An edition with introduction of the writings on wine-making and horticulture of Nicholas Herbemont (1760-1838), America’s first great vintner and visionary theorist of sustainable agriculture. To be published by the University of Georgia Press, this collection presents Herbemont’s two major tracts on wine making, his most important letters on vine growing published in The American Farmer and The Southern Agriculturist, his memorial to the senate of South Carolina, his 1829 “Address to the United Agricultural Society of South Carolina,” his essay on “Honesty” in agrarian life, and his plan for the ethical treatment of slaves. Projected publication: Fall 2008.

American Poetry:
The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
David S. Shields, Editor. Scheduled for Publication October 1, 2007, a collection of the most significant works of English-language poetry from the American colonial and early republican periods, featuring substantial offerings of verse drawn from the manuscript tradition of belles lettres as well as print. It covers 108 authors as well as folk balladry and anonymous popular verse. This collection supplants in thoroughness and representativeness every anthology of early American poetry ever assembled. In the early preparations for this collection, the editor’s intention had been to compile a collection reflecting the works of every European settled culture in early North America and the Caribbean—making available in translation important, but rare texts such as Escovedo’s “La Florida” and Dumont de Montigny’s verse account of the Natchez Revolt. Initial research, however, revealed that the corpus of surviving German language poetry exceeded that of English by nearly double the total pages written. The bulk of this literature has not received scholarly comment or editorial scrutiny. Years of labor would be required to sketch a canon of early German poetry. When initial translations were made of sample German and Dutch texts, the disparity in style between seventeenth and eighteenth-century English poems and the 21st century translations proved so aesthetically disruptive that the initial editorial program was abandoned and the project reorganized around constructing the most useful and wide-ranging collection of early American verse in English ever published. View the Table of Contents.