UVA Graduate Adrian Brettle Publishes "Colossal Ambitions"

Thursday, January 9, 2020

Recent UVA PhD Graduate Adrian Brettle's frist book, Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post–Civil War World (UVA Press, 2020), will be published in July. Brettle currently serves as Lecturer and Associate Director of the Political History and Leadership Program in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

From the UVA Press website:

"In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation—its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives of not only modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing toward a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war’s wake."

For more information, please visit the book's official webpage linked below.