In this Virginia History Blog on Revolutionary Virginia, we look at recent reviews beginning with “Patrick Henry: Proclaiming a Revolution” which features his oratory. George Washington is treated in two titles, “George Washington, Nationalist” focuses on Washington’s thirteen year career at the formation of the Union, while “George Washington, Wonder of the Age” surveys his...
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This Virginia History Blog assembles four reviews related to Early and Late Colonial Virginia warfare, both English colonial civil war and Anglo-Amerindian conflicts. For those interested in reading more deeply into mid-1600s Virginia, beyond the previously reviewed Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia by Warren M. Billings which was one of our...
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This Virginia History Blog introduces Early Colonial Cultures in Virginia by featuring two titles relating the cultural and political interactions of settlers and Algonquin tribes near and far, “Brothers among Nations” and “White People, Indians and Highlanders”. The infrastructure of early settlement is examined in two titles, “Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia” and “Courthouses of...
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The Virginia History Blog today looks at Early Colonial contact and culture Virginia through the reviews of five titles. “A Briefe and True Report” is a facsimile of a 1590 Latin edition with English translation and illustrated contemporary lithographs, reporting initial contact with native Algonquins, plants and animals found in the Chesapeake region. “Deadly Politics...
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In this Virginia History Blog, we begin our first digest of reviews from current journals about Colonial Era Virginia. Two are environmental histories, “A Cold Welcome” about the Little Ice Age, and “Wild by Nature” about marketed indigenous Southeast wildlife. “Esteemed Bookes of Lawe” concerns legal libraries of colonial Virginia and the training of the...
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At the four-hundred year anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, Virginia several books celebrated the event, and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography featured a review article of a number of them altogether. Several are still readily available from their publishers. Two have previously been reviewed here as among the our Virginia Survey Bibliographies...
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In this recap of the Civil War and Reconstruction Virginia, we begin with two titles addressing the role of slaves in the Civil War, first from a Union perspective in “The Peninsula Campaign and the Necessity of Emancipation”, then from the rebel point of view in “Confederate Slave Impressment”. Two social histories chronicling the immediate...
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The Civil War in Virginia was markedly different from the experience of other Confederate states in its position as a front line state that was actively defended throughout the duration of the conflict by resident Confederate armies defending against repeated, not to say continuous Union incursions. We begin this blog with “Notes from the Ground”...
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The topic of Thomas Jefferson, slavery and Hemingses has been the subject of several scholarly works and popular histories in recent years. Here we look at six titles representing several points of view on the subject over the course of thirty years. The considerable sustained interest in the topic has enabled all to remain in...
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In this Virginia History Blog, we explore the developments leading antebellum Virginia to hold the largest free black population, with artisans free and slave, with slave hires for industrial work and construction on canals and railroads. Virginia 1820-1860 was a slave state with an emerging market economy, industrialization and substantial out-migration of whites and blacks....
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