The best of Virginia’s antebellum social histories include six titles from a focus of local, ethnic, gender and religious investigation. We also include seven titles from bibliographies citing out of print books. Social and cultural histories include “American City, Southern Place” investigating antebellum Richmond, and “The Virginia Germans” looks at the two major influxes of a...
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This blog focuses on Virginia’s Antebellum economy. Like other border states, it grew apart from the Deep South mono-agricultural economies before the Civil War, though not at the frenetic changes of the magnitude seen in the North. To begin we look at Virginia’s “Urban Growth in the Age of Sectionalism” and at the comparative economic...
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This is the fourth of four blogs focusing on African American history in antebellum Virginia. We first look at social history in small plantation slavery in Virginia’s Appalachia in “The African-American Family”, and then at the mid-sized and large plantations of Loudoun County in “Life in White and Black”. Antibellum mix-race liaisons and families are...
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This is the third of four blogs focusing on African American history in antebellum Virginia. We look at resistance by those held in slavery, including rebellion and escape to freedom. “The River Flows On” includes New York, South Carolina and two Virginia revolts, while “Gabriel’s Rebellion” focuses on conspiracies in 1800 and 1802. Nat Turner’s...
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We begin the second of four blogs focusing on African American History in Antebellum Virginia with a look at the rise of the domestic slave trade after the legal prohibition of the trans-Atlantic trade in the Middle Passage from Africa with “A Troublesome Commerce” and “Carry Me Back”. At the same time half a million...
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We continue our look at Jacksonian Antebellum Virginia by looking at the “Yankeefication” of Virginia with “Rise of the Whigs” and “Migrants Against Slavery”. The classic “Road from Monticello” investigates the Slavery Debate of 1831-32, as does the “Drift Towards Dissolution” referring to the Virginia’s east-west sectional division. “Road to Disunion” examines the political currents...
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We begin our first of two blogs on Jacksonian Antebellum Virginia political history in the years 1810-1850 by first looking at “Sectionalism in Virginia” east and west, “Intellectual Life in the American South” with important Virginia contributions, and “The Second American Party System” explaining the growth of political parties in the states rather than Congressional...
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Here are four histories of free Blacks in Virginia highlighting self reliant communities in a slave society. Of course, Virginia’s free African Americans have a history dating from 1619 with their importation as “servants” with subsequent freedom and voting rights in the 1600s. But these focus on the era of their substantial expansion and integration...
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Four books offer an introduction to Virginia’s industrialization throughout the 1800s. The first as an introduction is “Tredegar Iron Works” by Nathan Vernon Madison in a short popular history spanning the antebellum period into the 1920s. Richmond’s first railroad was built to transport Midlothian coal and the second volume on Virginia industry is “Old Dominion,...
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For those interested in the political and social history of Civil War home front Virginia, four books are recommended. Unionists, Secessionists, free blacks and slaves are studied in “Old Southampton”, from the sectional crisis through the conflict and into Reconstruction. The black Virginian experience in the Civil War, whether slave or free, for blue or...
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