University of Virginia Press

08/08/2025

Nice new review for "From Dakota to Dixie" on Emerging Civil War!

"White and Connelly have done an excellent job of making Buswell’s diary an engaging and useful resource, that’s well worth the reader’s time."

From Dakota to Dixie: George Buswell’s Civil War. Edited by Jonathan W. White and Reagan Connelly. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2025. Softcover, 288 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Patrick Kelly-Fischer Two of the less discussed parts of American history from 1861-1865 are the Dakota War...

08/06/2025

Now available! Get your copy here: https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10165/

UVA Darden School of Business

Happy to "Ultimate Questions: A Stakeholder Guide to the Business of Your Life" by Andrew C. Wicks, with Alexander S. Bleiberg and John K. Nolan!

Who are we, and who am I? Why are we here, and why am I here? What is the good life, and what is my good life? How should I get along with others?

For years, business ethics professor Andrew Wicks pursued these lines of inquiry in his perennially popular course “Ultimate Questions and Creating Value for Stakeholders.” In this book, he presents the core ideas of the course to a general audience. Touching on a variety of possible answers—from philosophers, scientists, and more—without advocating for any single position, the book reminds readers that these questions are present in our lives every day and all the time. When we consider them consciously, we can identify our existing answers and craft new ones as we grow and change. They are at the core of what it means to live a fully realized life. And as the world becomes increasingly polarized, ultimate questions emerge as a critical lens through which to relate across difference. With gentle guidance, this book encourages the kind of difficult, vulnerable conversations that help us learn about and interact with each other more authentically—and offers tips on how to do so in a way that feels more like everyday dialogue among peers than hostile confrontations among rivals.

While this book is about finding individual answers to these questions, it is also about business and business leadership. Business is a fundamentally human activity, in which people work together to make themselves and each other better off. When business leaders and students ask these probing questions, it leads to more understanding, more collaboration, and better business outcomes. The book is deeply tied to stakeholder theory, which posits that a business succeeds when it serves a wide range of people in its value chain: customers, suppliers, employees, financiers, community members, and more. Considering these questions with members of all these groups enables business leaders to better understand how to serve their stakeholders and find new ways to generate prosperity—not just for investors or owners, but for all involved in the value-creation process of a company.

At once conceptual and down-to-earth, "Ultimate Questions" inspires reflection and offers tools to better understand ourselves and others, to build the kinds of connection and reciprocity needed to lead in business and to live with authenticity and purpose.

"A unique synthesis of philosophy, psychology, management theory, and more. This book would serve both as an excellent introduction to ethics in business and a medium for reflection among more senior practitioners or students."
- Jason Brennan, Georgetown University, coauthor of "Business Ethics for Better Behavior"

"Every student of business needs to read this book. Andy Wicks’ unique voice speaks to our hearts and minds at once."
- R. Edward Freeman, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, author of "Defeating Dengue: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach to Problem Solving"

https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10165/

08/05/2025

Happy to "Ultimate Questions: A Stakeholder Guide to the Business of Your Life" by Andrew C. Wicks, with Alexander S. Bleiberg and John K. Nolan!

Who are we, and who am I? Why are we here, and why am I here? What is the good life, and what is my good life? How should I get along with others?

For years, business ethics professor Andrew Wicks pursued these lines of inquiry in his perennially popular course “Ultimate Questions and Creating Value for Stakeholders.” In this book, he presents the core ideas of the course to a general audience. Touching on a variety of possible answers—from philosophers, scientists, and more—without advocating for any single position, the book reminds readers that these questions are present in our lives every day and all the time. When we consider them consciously, we can identify our existing answers and craft new ones as we grow and change. They are at the core of what it means to live a fully realized life. And as the world becomes increasingly polarized, ultimate questions emerge as a critical lens through which to relate across difference. With gentle guidance, this book encourages the kind of difficult, vulnerable conversations that help us learn about and interact with each other more authentically—and offers tips on how to do so in a way that feels more like everyday dialogue among peers than hostile confrontations among rivals.

While this book is about finding individual answers to these questions, it is also about business and business leadership. Business is a fundamentally human activity, in which people work together to make themselves and each other better off. When business leaders and students ask these probing questions, it leads to more understanding, more collaboration, and better business outcomes. The book is deeply tied to stakeholder theory, which posits that a business succeeds when it serves a wide range of people in its value chain: customers, suppliers, employees, financiers, community members, and more. Considering these questions with members of all these groups enables business leaders to better understand how to serve their stakeholders and find new ways to generate prosperity—not just for investors or owners, but for all involved in the value-creation process of a company.

At once conceptual and down-to-earth, "Ultimate Questions" inspires reflection and offers tools to better understand ourselves and others, to build the kinds of connection and reciprocity needed to lead in business and to live with authenticity and purpose.

"A unique synthesis of philosophy, psychology, management theory, and more. This book would serve both as an excellent introduction to ethics in business and a medium for reflection among more senior practitioners or students."
- Jason Brennan, Georgetown University, coauthor of "Business Ethics for Better Behavior"

"Every student of business needs to read this book. Andy Wicks’ unique voice speaks to our hearts and minds at once."
- R. Edward Freeman, University of Virginia Darden School of Business, author of "Defeating Dengue: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach to Problem Solving"

https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10165/

08/04/2025

Happy to "The Evolution of a Rural Free Black Community: Goochland County, Virginia, 1728-1832" by Reginald D. Butler! Edited by Peter S. Onuf.

Reginald Butler, the second director of UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, wrote an influential and much-cited but never published dissertation at Johns Hopkins University that focused on community formation among the free Black population of Virginia. His innovative and meticulous research in county and state archives enabled him to reconstruct the ties that bound free Black Virginians to each other and their enslaved neighbors, as well as to white employers and officials.

Butler showed that community formation emerged in response to an oppressive, often violent regime of racial domination, yet it also depended on the critical role free Black people played in the local economy and their ability to sustain reciprocally beneficial working relations with their white neighbors. By reconstructing the lived experience of free Black families and the community they created at the neighborhood level, Butler’s revelatory study offers still fresh perspectives on race and slavery in the formative decades of Virginian and American history. Now this seminal work finally sees the light of day, accompanied by several framing essays that properly situate Butler’s foundational scholarship on free Black Americans in this still-burgeoning field.

"Butler’s study stands the test of time. Lively and rich in detail, it is a major contribution to the scholarship on Virginia history."
- Warren Eugene Milteer Jr., George Washington University, author of "Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South"

"Butler's work, along with its companion essays, will be celebrated by researchers of all kinds as a great contribution to understanding a period that was foundational to subsequent centuries of race relations in Virginia, and as an example of how to use archival records to depict the nuances of people’s lives."
- Sara Bon-Harper, Ph.D., Executive Director of James Monroe’s Highland

https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10055/

08/04/2025

Happy to "Seeking Justice: The Extraordinary Freedom Suits of an Enslaved Virginia Family" by Daniel B. Thorp!

The amazing story of one illegally enslaved Virginia family’s dauntless legal appeal for freedom

Before the Civil War brought emancipation to the South, some enslaved people managed to use the legal system—the same one that had concocted and long perpetuated their bondage—to sue for their freedom from owners who unlawfully held them in slavery. In "Seeking Justice", Daniel Thorp tells the story behind Unis v. Charlton’s Administrator, one of the most extensive of these freedom suits in all of American history.

It began when a woman, known only as Flora, was born in Connecticut and sold into slavery in Virginia. Her children sued, and over more than thirty years, four cases involving almost fifty plaintiffs moved through the Virginia court system before finally reaching a conclusion in 1855. "Seeking Justice" narrates this remarkable saga, illuminating Black Americans’ legal literacy and shining a light on the unusual permutations of the antebellum judicial world and the courage it took for Flora’s family to plunge into the legal heart of a slave society.

"A masterful study. Thorp traces a Black family’s tireless struggles to free themselves, offering remarkable testimony to the ingenuity and resilience of enslaved people in the antebellum United States."
- Richard Bell, University of Maryland, author of "Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home"

https://upress.virginia.edu/title/10101/

07/21/2025

SHEAR 2025 is over but the conference discount code lives on...until August 15! Use promo code at checkout for 40% off select books!

https://upress.virginia.edu/exhibits/SHEAR25/

07/17/2025

Happy to "The Belgian Friendship Building: From the New York World's Fair to a Virginia HBCU" by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Katherine M. Kuenzli, and Bryan Clark Green!

How did the Belgian Friendship Building, originally constructed for the 1939 New York World’s Fair—and one of only a few surviving buildings from that celebrated exhibition—end up on the campus of an HBCU in Richmond, Virginia? In this richly illustrated book, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Katherine Kuenzli, and Bryan Clark Green relate the fascinating story, spanning three continents, of a distinctly modern structure that has towered over Virginia Union University, in a city characterized by its traditional architecture, for more than eighty years. It is a structure whose original purposes—to present modern Belgian design and to extol its racist, colonial regime—stand in stark contrast to its dedication in 1941 to Robert L. Vann, longtime editor of one of America’s most illustrious historic Black newspapers. The Belgian Friendship Building is an enduring example of prewar modernism designed by a team of Belgian architects under the direction of Henry van de Velde that has until now been all but forgotten in histories of modern architecture. This indispensable, multifaceted account ties together the history of modern European architecture, colonial exploitation, and African American achievement in a brilliant and compelling case study.

"Poses important questions about the ambivalent relationships between modernist architecture and racial and colonial issues that are now at the heart of contemporary debates in architectural historiography."
—Johan Lagae, Ghent University, co-editor of "African Modernism and Its Afterlives"

07/16/2025

https://savingplaces.org/stories/how-marjorie-leighey-saved-her-home-a-story-in-five-acts?utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=historic%20sites

One woman's remarkable journey to save her home from a highway, and how it helped inspire the National Historic Preservation Act.

07/16/2025

Happy to the new edition of "Biography of a Tenement House in New York City: An Architectural History of 97 Orchard Street" by Andrew S. Dolkart

This edition expands on the story of the many immigrants who lived in the building to include the story of Joseph Moore, an African American waiter who lived nearby with his wife and stepdaughter, providing a more fully realized account of the neighborhood, the city, and the many tenement residents whose stories have become woven into the nation’s history.

"A must read for anyone interested in the history of vernacular domestic architecture in the United States."
- Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum

Tenement Museum

07/11/2025

The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment conference is wrapping up, but our 40% discount code is active through the end of the month. Don't miss out!

Check out our virtual exhibit here: https://upress.virginia.edu/exhibits/ASLE25/

07/11/2025

Congratulations to Mark H. Hough, author of "Design through Time: Evolving Landscapes, from Alcatraz to Prospect Park", who has been awarded the LaGasse Medal from the American Society of Landscape Architects!

"The best of the best in landscape architecture."

https://archinect.com/news/bustler/10568/american-society-of-landscape-architects-unveils-2025-honors-recipients