TABLE OF CONTENTS
Build your Virginia History Library
You can build your own personalized Virginia History Library. The starting place is my 12-Steps to a Personal Library of Virginia History below. First there is the section on survey histories of Virginia’s four hundred years.
The Virginia Historian offers webpages and a blog featuring digests of reviews from academic journals on titles related to historical periods and topics. Look for books about your personal interests, and you can buy them online at Amazon.com.
Historical eras are broadly divided into Colonial 1600-1763, Revolution and New Nation 1750-1824, Civil War Era 1820-1883, and New South and Modern 1880-present. Topics in each historical era are divided broadly into three general groups varying according to the historiography in each era: Political and Economic, Social and Ethnic, and Wars in Virginia.
Note: Wherever possible, reviews at The Virginia Historian.com use reference material from the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, and the William and Mary Quarterly for early American scholarship.
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12-Steps to a Personal Library of Virginia History
by Richard G. Zimermann, The Virginia Historian
There are twelve ways to build your personal library, beginning with a good survey of Virginia history. But don’t forget The Virginia History Blog to keep current, and the TVH webpages for the top 300 picks and additional titles reviewed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography to the present.
Subscribe to The Virginia History Blog for new titles reviewed from current quarterly academic journals related to Virginia History.
These include 1) The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 2) the Journal of Southern History and 3) the Journal of American History. For historical eras, TVH subscribes to 4) the William and Mary Quarterly for colonial history 1500-1775, 5) the Journal of the Early Republic for 1775-1830, 6) the Journal of the Civil War Era for 1830-1880, and 7) the Journal of the Gilded Age for 1865-1924.
Take advantage of the TVH web site that features pages with a top pick 300 titles of Virginia History taken from two surveys used by Virginia university courses. They are organized by historical periods, general surveys, local histories, biographies and tourist destinations. Additional titles are added quarterly since Spring 2018. Previous years of titles reviewed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography are being updated in increments from the years 2006 to 2017. (Local histories and biographies will be under construction and made current in 2019.)
To begin
1. Use the bibliographies in your survey of Virginia history (see The Virginia Historian webpage book club for a link to Amazon.com to buy one of them). These references associated with footnotes or the author’s bibliography essays become your to-buy list that you can search for at several sources discussed below. See the webpage on Virginia History Surveys and References for a fuller description.
See Heinemann, et. al., Old Dominion, New Commonwealth, Wallenstein’s Cradle of America: Four Centuries of Virginia History, or Virginius Dabney’s Virginia: The New Dominion. Otis Rice’s West Virginia: A History includes a focus on western Virginia until 1863 at the admission of the new state. Brent Tarter’s Grandees of Government is a survey of Virginia’s political history.
Virginia surveys of women’s history include Cynthia Kierner’s Changing History: Virginia Women Through Four Centuries, and Suzanne Lebsock’s Virginia Women 1600-1945: “A Share of Honor”. Virginia’s Native American peoples is considered in Helen Rountree’s Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries. Virginia’s African American survey history is Philip Morgan’s “Don’t Grieve After Me”: The Black Experience in Virginia, 1619-1986.
2. At your local library, when you find an interesting title, search among the books shelved immediately left and right, above and below, for similar titles. These become add-ons to search through their bibliographies to add to your to-buy list.
Also, whenever you find a title that might interest you in newspaper book reviews or in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, request your local library to buy a copy; you get to be first on the notification list when it comes in if they agree to acquire it.
3. Topic-search your specialty interest online under the “books” drop down menu tab. This will bring up books in print, and also those out-of-print available from booksellers such as Abebooks. (But also see #11 below before you buy.)
4. Follow book reviews in the Washington Post and the New York Times, the political and cultural capitals of the United States. These often will be the subject of an introductory period discount at a bookstore near you.
Brick and mortar stores
5. Use your independent bookstore to browse for titles of interest, and scan left and right, above and below, in a place where local authors and topic selections are often broader than those found at chain store outlets. Tell the proprietor of topics of your interest and they can special order titles for you.
6. Talk to your local bookseller. Used bookstore owners require turnover of their inventory to stay in business, just as other stores do. Let the proprietor know of your interest, and you will have another set of eyes visiting Virginia estate sales and library book sales, looking for your subject matter, or even specific titles of interest.
7. Visit a chain store’s browsing their Virginiana section. Do not overlook the tables of new titles, the U.S. history section, at the discount shelves and on book carts floating among the store stacks.
Alternative book-buying venues
8. Library book sales. These are a great way to support your local library and feather your own nest at the same time. Generally library membership allows early hours purchasing before the general public is admitted.
9. Visit your local university bookstore. Often history courses require readings supplemental to the main textbook, and these can be a rich source of scholarly pamphlets and article reprints unavailable anywhere else.
10. Attend author presentations at your local history society, and buy a book.
Create your own book
11. Engage a reprint publisher on demand, such as Politics and Prose in Washington DC for public domain titles that you find online. You do not need to buy an original copy at greater expense, and the POD book generally will be of better condition, many costing $20 or less.
12. Take advantage of either your public library computer terminals, the low-cost subscription through the Virginia Historical Society, or your sometimes free university alumni association’s account to access to JSTOR to search for articles in academic journals related to your topics of interest. Print them out and bind them in three-ring binders for reference.
Now you are ready to begin with a good survey of Virginia history at the webpage onVirginia History Surveys and References where you can browse Amazon links.