TABLE OF CONTENTS
This page looks at the best of Virginia Titles and Local Histories. UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Note: Wherever possible, reviews at The Virginia Historian.com use reference material from the Journal of American History, the Journal of Southern History, and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, to address topics of Virginia history generally, and the William and Mary Quarterly for early American scholarship.
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Virginia Titles, 1600 – Present
Early and Late Colonial Era, 1600 – 1763
Colonial Virginia
Colonial Virginia: A History (1986) by Warren M Billings, John E. Selby, Thad W. Tate covers both Early Colonial and Late Colonial periods, with an afterward assessment of the Revolution. While overall a political history, attention is also paid to Indians, women, servants, yeomen and slaves. The unifying theme is the emergence of Virginia’s planter elite, including complications.
Billings describes most of the 17th century, an evolution from boomtown charter generations to the emergence of a dominating white planter class, from ambitious adventurers exploiting dependent indentured servants, to large planters with slaves.
Selby outlines the developments of the middle period to 1750 with the demographic reliance on slave labor for the tobacco cash crop to ensure material prosperity and a measure of independence from the British imperial order based on the insularity of the county courts and development of General Assembly privileges, the Golden Age of Colonial Virginia.
Thad W. Tate analyses the Late Colonial period studied to 1780, with its decay of social deference and persistent instability of the tobacco economy. National American leaders arose from among the Virginians to challenge the loss of colonial prerogatives and English rights, calling on a commitment to liberty and equality that would eventually undermine slavery in the new country. Within a decade of the Revolution, Virginia lost its larger vision, the Tidewater economy collapsed and the state found itself in a cultural backwater. Learn more to buy “Colonial Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
The Atlantic World and Virginia
The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 (2007, 2017) was edited by Peter C. Mancall. It is a collection of eighteen essays from several disciplines focusing on early colonial period developments in Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay.
The relationships and contests with the 1600s English outpost are placed in context with developments in Native America, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.
The first party is devoted to the Native American setting among the Chesapeake Algonquins, especially the Powhatan menace. Part two looks into Africa and the Atlantic focusing on slave trade and resistance to it on that continent. Part three investigates the European models from the Spanish and the French, closely inspecting Caribbean examples.
Part four explores the intellectual currents for and about British colonization in the New World. Part five telescopes onto Virginia and the Atlantic World. Learn more to buy “The Atlantic World and Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Atlantic Virginia
Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (2007) was written by April Lee Hatfield. The Atlantic world of early colonial Virginia was not an isolated self-reliant outpost. It was enmeshed in a web of maritime connections not only to England, but also to other English colonies in New England and the Caribbean. It connected to other Europeans and their colonies especially New Netherlands and the Caribbean. Virginia was also tethered to the received land trade routes of the Algonquin and Powhatan Indians for commerce and expansion and prosperity.
Without established port centers, the dispersed great plantations and colony-sponsored landings were directly accessible to shipmasters from the Atlantic and Caribbean. These included English, Dutch, French and Spanish from Europe, Africa, North and South America. While the lower Tidewater traded tobacco with England, in the Eastern Shore and elsewhere in Virginia, most trade was export grains and provisions to other colonies.
Networks of families and faith made profitable trade connections across colonial and national divisions. Barbados became a principle source of slave labor after 1650, and slave codes in Virginia, South Carolina and Jamaica followed Barbados as a model. Learn more to buy “Atlantic Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Early Modern Virginia – 17th Century
Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (2011) by Douglas Bradburn highlights Virginia’s unique characteristics and history within the 17th century Chesapeake society in a collection of essays.
It explores the origins of slavery and the experience of women indentured servants. Contributors document that the often slighted religious context of 1600s Virginia society was akin to New England’s, and they study the Virginian colonist social deference and defiance that were “flip sides of the same conceptual coin.”
Persistence and continuity are found in Dutch commercial influence and the development of Middle Plantation (later Williamsburg), as well imperial developments in the slave trade. Learn more to buy “Early Modern Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Revolution, Constitution, New Nation Era, 1750 – 1824
Revolution in Virginia
The Revolution in Virginia, 1775-1783 was written by John E. Selby in 1988. He emphasizes the political, administrative and military developments in Virginia. Major revolutionary ideas were pronounced and gained currency while the social order was disturbed perhaps least of all among the new states.
The oldest, largest and most populous British North American colony was riven by factional rivalries and personal jealousies when it came to mounting a defense against Britain. The autonomous County courts made for a kind of a federal system of governance in Virginia, even as intellectually in revolutionary republican terms there comes to be a written Constitution, a Declaration of Rights, disestablishment of the Anglican Church, and abolition of entail estates.
While Virginia was a mainstay for both northern and southern campaigns, the military events in Virginia are well described, both major and minor, at land and at sea, in the Tidewater and on the sometimes savage frontier. Learn more to buy “Revolution in Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Grandees of Government
In Brent Tartar’s The Grandees of Government: The origins and persistence of undemocratic politics in Virginia, the Old Dominion’s traditionally undemocratic institutions are explored. Virginia’s history has been marked by resistance to democratic change compared to the histories of other states in the Union. The structure of American republicanism was a federal relationship, allowing each state to live out its own progress towards modern participatory democracy.
The Internal Enemy
The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 was written by Alan Taylor in 2014. In twelve chapters, this book spans the context of Virginia history from 1772, encompassing Governor Dunmore’s emancipation of 1775, additional British emancipations over the course of the War of 1812, through Nat Turner’s Rebellion of 1832.
Runaways, after securing their freedom at the hands of the British, often returned to their plantations to release family and friends. Free blacks settled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Bermuda and Trinidad. Learn more to buy “The Internal Enemy” here for your bookshelf.
Antebellum, Civil War, Reconstruction Era, 1820 – 1883
Dominion of Memories
From the richest state with the largest population, producing not only the tobacco cash crop, but also the most pig iron in the nation, Virginia became “poor on principle,” as Philip Nicholas declared in the General Assembly in 1829. In The Dominion of Memories: Jefferson, Madison & the Decline of Virginia, Susan Dunn chronicles Virginia’s deliberate legislative choice over decades to throttle enterprise and industrial development.Bound Away
Three hundred years of Virginia’s frontiersmen and frontiersmen from Virginia are described in Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (2000) by David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly. The focus of this book is immigration of whites and blacks into eastern Virginia, internal migrations within Virginia west, and out-migrations to other frontiers and states.
Each wave of immigration used the cultural backgrounds of the participants to reformulate a new society in each succeeding far-flung place. Each wave was more democratic in its political organization. Many 19th century state began their histories with Virginia-born leaders in state government and in their Congressional delegations, not only from Kentucky which began as a Virginian county, but also Illinois, Missouri and Texas. Buy “Bound Away” at Amazon.com here.
Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth
Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: coal politics and economy in Antebellum America (2010) by Sean Patrick Adams in 300 pages shows that state legislature politics built institutional structures for the coal industry in both Virginia and Pennsylvania. In Virginia the landed elites fostered policy that proved incapable of balancing disparate geographic and industrial interests. With limited canals improvements, restricted incorporation laws and prohibitive restraint on capital formation, Virginia fell behind Pennsylvania in coal production between 1820 and the end of the 1830s.
The Pennsylvanians started behind the Virginians in the 1790s, their anthracite coal was harder to mine and more difficult to ignite for commercial and domestic use than Virginia’s bituminous coal. But the Pennsylvania canal system connected its fields to eastern markets, and the addition of British coal miners brought skills and innovation that increased productivity not seen among Virginia’s enterprises of slave labor. The Virginian political strategy which served only its eastern tobacco interests led inevitably to an eclipse of Virginia’s leadership in coal production. Buy “Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth” at Amazon.com here.
A Saga of the New South
A Saga of the New South: Race, Law and Public Debt in Virginia (2016) by Brent Tartar
Gilded Age, New South, Modern Era, 1880 – Present
*Edward Younger and James Tice Moore edited The Governors of Virginia, 1860-1978 in 1982. It is out of print but available online used. Learn more to buy “The Governors of Virginia” here for your bookshelf.
Blue Laws and Black Codes
Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia was written by Peter Wallenstein in 2004. It examines the law as a link between social and racial conflict and change from 1890 to 1970. The first three essays relate the social changes upheld by the Virginia State Courts involving the unpaid labor for road construction, Sunday closing laws and women choosing legal careers.
The next three essays focus on legal challenges to Virginia’s system of white supremacy. For these, Virginia courts upheld segregation into the 1960s, requiring plaintiffs to turn to the federal courts for relief. NAACP lawyers Oliver Hill and Samuel W. Tucker committed decades to challenging every aspect of Jim Crow discrimination. The Richmond sit-in movement contributed to integrating public places. Richard and Mildred Loving successfully challenged Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute.
The last chapter looks at the ways political power is wielded and public policy effected. These related to the one-man-one-vote apportionment in state and local elections and abolition of the poll tax. Learn more to buy “Blue Laws and Black Codes” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Local Histories, 1600 – Present
Tidewater and Eastern Shore
Tobacco Coast
Tobacco Coast: A Maritime History of Chesapeake Bay in the Colonial Era (1984) by Arthur Pierce Middleton studies the middle colonial period emphasizing 1660 to 1763 to show how the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries shaped the development of Virginia and Maryland. Navigable streams and tobacco cultivation led to rapid increase of wealth and population, limiting impulse for commercial centers other than the shipbuilding port cities of Norfolk and Baltimore. Threats to shipping from activity by Spanish, Dutch, French and pirates were ineffectively countered by colonial privateers until the British navy convoy system was established in 1707, the dawning of Virginia’s colonial Golden Age.
Most of the British born commerce was for tobacco, amounting to half of continental American trade. American capital in colonial vessels traded mainly for grains destined for South European and foreign West Indies colonies was carried on by1,200 colonial mariners. Attention is paid to the British and African trade in European emigrants and slaves, as well as the two-fifths British export trade arriving in the Chesapeake. Learn more to buy “Tobacco Coast” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Old Southampton
Old Southampton: politics and society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869 (1994, 2015) by Daniel W. Croft illuminates state and national developments over thirty-five years, in Union, Confederacy and Reconstruction through his study of the local history of agricultural Southampton County in Southeast Virginia. The experiences of two diarists represent partisan county divisions throughout the book, demonstrating that the white South was not monolithic.
Southwest of the Nottoway River bisecting the county where the traditional planter Daniel Cobb lived, was cotton plantation country of slave labor, Methodists and Democrats. Northeast of the river where the innovating merchant Elliott Story lived, was a mixed agricultural economy of “smallholders” with few slaves, Baptists, Quakers and Whigs.
The political awakening of the African-American community to emancipation and enfranchisement resulted in the election of a black delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1868 from Southampton. Buy “Old Southampton” at Amazon.com here.
Myne Owne Ground
“Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (1980, 2004) by T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes explores mid-1600s Northampton County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in its slavery, freedom and race relations. In the harsh context of exploitive frontier plantation life, a group of blacks established themselves as free people during the onset of slave labor replacing indentured servitude. By extraordinary hard work, they bought themselves and their families out of bondage and assimilated as “black Englishmen” into the larger society.
For two generations they were able to meet whites as equals, whether as free peasantry, or as small landowners such as the Johnson, Harmon or Payne families. Economic status rather than race was the determining factor in early colonial society. However, following the great planter reaction to Bacon’s Rebellion, the status of free blacks deteriorated after the mid-1670s. The importation of “unacculturated” African slave labor in large numbers brought hardening racial barriers. Learn more to buy “Myne Owne Ground” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Race and Class in Colonial Virginia
Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore during the Seventeenth Century (1993) by Joseph Douglas Deal examines the “triracial encounter” there. Native Americans contributed food, farming expertise, cleared fields and a sustained lucrative fur trade. Next considered are the English indentured servants, and the development of a planter elite.
Forty years into Virginia’s history, planters in the Eastern Shore began holding blacks as slaves for life, though some continued to secure freedom by manumission and self-purchase. As the labor force of the slave population increased, the “social space” free blacks had claimed for themselves in the charter generations shrank substantially. Free blacks often could find individual success only by migrating to more hospitable regions. Learn more to buy “Race and Class in Colonial Virginia” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
A Place in Time
A Place in time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750 (1984) by Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman reconstructs life in colonial Middlesex County, Virginia. Early on, frontier society gave modest opportunity to ex-servants. Then after the 1670s, those social structures were disrupted with the introduction of slavery to comprise the large scale planters’ tobacco labor force. And finally, a more hierarchal class society developed in the 1700s.
Early society was structured in concentric circles, providing for a dispersed population. Friends and relatives lived in neighborhoods, these centered about parishes, and parishes centered on county courts and administration. A half a century later as the 1700s began, counties began to be divided as tangential circles within each county, marked by class relationships and economic activity. Urban centers were set apart from circles of poor farmers and middling planters, who were in turn set apart from the slave populations centered on the great plantations of large planters. These had little interaction compared to earlier times. Learn more to buy “A Place in Time” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Free Blacks in Norfolk
Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790-1860: The Darker Side of Freedom (1997) by Tommy L. Bogger studies the free blacks of Norfolk from 1790 to 1860. In 1782 the General Assembly made private manumissions easier, but the slave rebellions in Haiti and Virginia led to restrictions on the personal liberty and economic opportunity of free blacks in Virginia.
In Norfolk, over half of the manumissions came from the self-purchase of artisan men and their families. A mutually supportive free black community developed in the city, though under constant fear of being kidnapped and sold into the Lower South.
Amidst economic decline in the port city, an influx of European immigrants led to sterner economic competition and a more precarious existence. Unlike the more tolerant conditions in Northern cities such as Philadelphia, the conditions in Norfolk led some numbers to join the colonization movement in Liberia, seeking the chance to escape persecution and better their economic condition. Learn more about “Free Blacks in Norfolk” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Gilded Age Norfolk
Gilded Age Norfolk, Virginia: Tidewater Wealth, Industry and Propriety (2015) by Jaclyn Spainhour
Northern Virginia to Fredericksburg
Seasons of War
Seasons of War: the Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865 (1996, 2013) – by Daniel E. Sutherland relates the experiences of people in Culpeper County Virginia during the Civil War on almost a daily basis. The county strategically lies between the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers on the only North-South railroad to nearby Richmond. About half the book deals with the civilian community, about half with the military fighting over it and occupying it.
This is the place of Confederate riflemen of the Culpeper Volunteers and Robert E. Lee, commanding, of Willis Madden, free black farmer, and Unionist John Minor Botts and his daughters. Yankee privates, corporals and Ulysses S. Grant are introduced when they are here, as well as army nurses in three Confederate hospitals and Union nurses Clara Barton and Walt Whitman.
It was a time of war in Culpeper County, including big battles at Cedar Mountain and Brandy Station, but also forays, sniper fire, skirmishes, and minor battles as the two sides switched their occupations. Civilian property depredations followed the Yankee John Pope’s General Order No. 5. Following the Emancipation Proclamation there was a mass exodus of blacks from local churches in 1863, and active slave Unionist activity late in the war. Buy “Seasons of War” at Amazon.com here.
Richmond and Southside Piedmont
Israel on the Appomattox
Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (2005) by Melvin Patrick looks at the free black community of Israel Hill in Southside’s tobacco growing Prince Edward County. In doing so he also makes connections to broader regional and national narratives, marking its anomalous existence of relative racial harmony in day-to-day life amidst Richmond’s growing legislative antagonism to free blacks generally.
While set in a county where two-thirds of the whites owned slaves, and the free blacks were outnumbered twelve to one by slaves, this book advances the story of black accomplishment. In this case, Israel Hill’s economic contribution to the county’s prosperity was effected by rural smallholders, artisans and the boatmen who plied the hundred miles along the Appomattox River to Petersburg. Learn more about “Israel on the Appomattox” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Artisan Workers, Petersburg
Artisan Workers in the Upper South: Petersburg, Virginia, 1820-1865 (2008) by Diane Barnes looks at four classes of artisans in Antebellum Petersburg, including the largest free black community as a percentage of its population in Virginia, which in turn had the largest free black population in the South. Other artisan classes were skilled slaves for hire, white wage earners, and master mechanics who were both slave holding and hirers of white and black free labor. Each class has their own dedicated chapter.
In Petersburg, a center of industry and transportation second only to Richmond, there was railroad and construction work along with employment in tobacco, iron, cotton and milling manufacturing. The whites living in a slave society were not as concerned with exploitation by bosses as were their Northern counterparts; they were more persistently antagonistic towards black labor competition, both slave and free. Learn more about “Artisan Workers in the Upper South” for your bookshelf at Amazon.com.
Gilded Age Richmond
Gilded Age Richmond: Gaiety, Greed & Lost Cause Mania (2017) by Brian Burns
Valley of Virginia and Southwestern Virginia
Gilded Age Roanoke
Roanoke, Virginia, 1882-1912: Magic City of the New South (2008) by Rand Dotson