The anniversary year produced more than its share of important new books on Virginia, including the first two scholarly histories of the state.
. . .
The year’s most important book treating the founding is Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s The Jamestown Project (392 pages, Harvard, $29.95), which places the settlement of Virginia within a context of competition for empire. Its central character is Captain John Smith, but it is not a mere retelling of his life. Kupperman analyzes the motivations of the colony’s sponsors and the several near-disasters of the colonists. Smith’s books emerge as his most important legacy. He learned from what took place at Jamestown and imparted the lessons to the settlers of the next generations of English colonies, who avoided the worst of the mistakes of the Jamestown project.
. . .
Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (384 pages, Hill and Wang, $27) explains how ordinary people influenced the authors of the Constitution. Small farmers and tenant farmers, merchants, taxpayers and others employed the powers of the state governments to ease their tax burdens and make it easier to pay their debts. In response, the authors of the Constitution created a stronger and less democratic national government to curb the dangers of excessive democracy in the states. State leaders, including Patrick Henry in Virginia, objected so effectively that they forced Congress to prepare the Bill of Rights.
Jon Kukla’s Mr. Jefferson’s Women (304 pages, Knopf, $26.95) analyzes the attitudes about women of the author of %26quot;all men are created equal.%26quot; Jefferson believed that women had no place in the public sphere and that the Revolution was principally for white men. In his personal relationships with women, Jefferson showed himself a selfish and sometimes controlling patriarch. In more ways than one, Jefferson’s legacy is complex and mixed.
. . .
Marie Tyler-McGraw’s An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (264 pages, University of North Carolina, $34.95) is in part about the white Virginia members of the American Colonization Society and their ambivalence about slavery and whether free white and black Americans could peacefully coexist. It is also about the black Virginians who founded the colony in west Africa that became Liberia and about how they transferred to Africa some of the values and behaviors of the white Virginians who had once owned many of them.
. . .
Rand Dotson’s Roanoke, Virginia, 18821912 (376 pages, University of Tennessee, $42) explains the successes and failures of the state’s most rapidly growing city at the end of the 19th century. The city’s founders erected large factories and railroad facilities, banks, businesses, elegant hotels and private residences. The city’s working classes crowded into substandard housing and labored hard under dangerous industrial conditions. Roanoke had a terrible race riot and one appalling lynching but also took important steps in urban planning and social reform, all in the space of a few dramatic years.
From frontier colony to modern urban state, these books exhibit some of what is new about Virginia’s past.
ambivalence,new books,plo,successes
Related Articles
No user responded in this post
Leave A Reply
Please Note: Comment moderation maybe active so there is no need to resubmit your comments