Early Virginia Research Articles

Ghosts, Trysts, and Colonial Courts: Micro-History and Legal History in Early America

Legal historian John Ruston Pagan has recently revealed that Anne Orthwood and John Kendall first had sex on a Saturday night in 1663. Meanwhile, early American historian Elaine Forman Crane has recounted for the curious that the weather was fine on the wintry day Rebecca Cornell met a mysterious death in 1673. So go the opening lines of their new contributions to early American legal history. Who were Anne, John, and Rebecca, and why have Pagan and Crane unearthed and related such seemingly insignificant details of their lives and deaths? In a win for the genre of micro-history, Pagan's Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia and Crane's Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell each spin engaging yarns that tie together the best of recent scholarship on the colonial Chesapeake and colonial New England respectively while also interweaving their tales with fresh historical questions and issues. Best of all, because both books are brief and compulsively readable, they offer the kind of work tailor-made to grip and hold the imaginations of undergraduates in early American survey courses everywhere.

The Best and Worst Country in the World: Perspectives on the Early Virginia Landscape; Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier; Landscape with Figures: Nature and Culture in New England; American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865

The Best and Worst Country in the World: Perspectives on the Early Virginia Landscape; Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier; Landscape with Figures: Nature and Culture in New England; American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865

Review: The Best and Worst Country in the World: Perspectives on the Early Virginia Landscape

Review: The Best and Worst Country in the World: Perspectives on the Early Virginia Landscape

Revealing Liberalism in Early America: Rethinking Religious Liberty and Liberal Values

In 1966, Marvin Singleton published an essay in the Journal of Church and State entitled Colonial Virginia as First Amendment Ma trix. Read several decades removed from the essay's historiographical context, Singleton's effort now appears as a standard recounting of Vir ginia's revolutionary debates on tax support for public churches, or what is more commonly categorized as an attempt at estab lishment. Yet Singleton described his own effort as far from standard. In fact, he believed that it filled a void in the history of Virginia's strug gle for religious liberty, as evidenced in Singleton's statement: A bal anced chronicle of the events surrounding Patrick Henry's effort during 1784 and 1785 to achieve tax support for Virginia teachers of the Christian religion is presently needed.1 Such need arose from the fact that shortly before the 1960s, Supreme Court justices had referred more than once to early Virginia history for substantiation of their rela tively new First Amendment religion clause jurisprudence.2 Virginia history thus became central in the development of modern definitions

Secrets of the Dead II: Death at Jamestown

Secrets of the Dead II: Death at Jamestown explores why so many settlers died in the first three years of settlement at Jamestown. The video highlights recent archaeological discoveries of the fort site and of a settler's skeleton, and it summarizes the conflicts among Jamestown residents, relations with the Indians, and the starving time. The format is familiar —interviews with the anthropologist who led the excavations, short statements by Ivor Noel Hume (the dean of early Virginia archaeologists) and staff from the national park at Jamestown, on-site footage, dramatizations, and seventeenth-century maps and drawings. To add drama, the script exaggerates historical neglect of Jamestown in favor of New England. Colonial historiography once had a New England bias, but there is also a long tradition of work on Virginia's founding, and both a state and a national park interpret the Jamestown experience. Similarly, the video treats the gunshot death of the person whose remains were found as a mystery. Nonetheless, if the documentary had ended after the first half hour, it would be a useful and colorful introduction to Jamestown.

The Best and Worst Country in the World: Perspectives on the Early Virginia Landscape. By Stephen Adams. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. xii + 305 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.50

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Best and Worst Country in the World: Perspectives on the Early Virginia Landscape. By Stephen Adams. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. xii + 305 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.50Daniel J. PhilipponDaniel J. Philippon University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 7, Number 3July 2002 Published for the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society Views: 1Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3985929 Views: 1Total views on this site © 2002 American Society for Environmental History and Forest History SocietyPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Music in Early Virginia

Virginia's ideals, virtually synonymous with those of young American republic, dominated Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Four of first five presidents were Virginians. No other state has had as long a political and cultural history. And yet, even today, Old Dominion's precedence seems to be ignored, especially in history of American music. Leaving aside political historiography, and those earliest histories of music intentionally devoted to New England, most general texts dealing with American music have neglected musical activity in early Virginia.1 Curiously enough, tradition and myth rather than fact seem to be behind this position. Frideric Louis Ritter, our first scientific historian, who dedicated himself to accentuation of which is in accordance with a true art spirit, is seemingly confused by fact that while English cavaliers appeared in Virginia [1607] fourteen years before arrival of 'May Flower' [1620] .. . yet they exercised very little influence on American musical development. Of course, Ritter was puzzled. If Virginians were indeed fun-loving, sybaritic Englishmen, as implied by term cavalier, one should have expected them to foster music. According to him, they did not. The Puritans, on other hand, who lived to destroy pleasures of this world better to enjoy those of next, or so story goes, developed the crude form of barbarously sung simple psalmody from

Becoming Baptists: Conversion in Colonial and Early National Virginia

BETWEEN 1755 AND 1790 VIRGINIANS PARTICIPATED IN A SERIES OF religious revivals that were crucial in rooting the Baptist Church in the South. Historians have long sought to explain the appeal of Baptist practice and faith to those who first embraced them in this staunchly Anglican region, as becoming a Baptist at that moment was difficult and sometimes even dangerous work. It was difficult because converts had to act and think in profoundly new ways. When Virginians joined Baptist churches they eschewed the predictable cycle of the Book of Common Prayer and the quiet, private worship that characterized Anglicanism to embrace a far more spontaneous and emotional practice that demanded a great deal from converts. Baptists also had to accept the far stricter discipline of their new church, which demanded a detailed, public airing of personal sin and required that congregants take an active part in disciplining one another for those sins. In the end, Baptists were also relinquishing the comforts of Anglican Arminianism for the harsher Calvinism of their new faith. At the same time, those who responded to revival preaching subjected themselves to danger by joining Baptist churches, because they took up a faith that violated the legal establishment of the Church of England, making converts into potential lawbreakers and exposing them to extralegal mob violence. A number of historians have interpreted the rise of the Baptist Church as an event centered around class interests in some way. While acknowledging that the occasional planter family found their way into fellowship, some of these historians have claimed that Baptist worship attracted mostly the smallest farmers and slaves, while others maintain that solid yeomen filled the first meetinghouses.(1) Some have gone a step further to argue that early Baptists were attracted to the faith precisely by a sense of discontentment with their place in the social order, so that their class background may be understood as directly related to their conversions. Others have suggested that Baptists stood apart from their fellow southerners in more profound cultural ways. Dissenting congregations, populated by those who rejected the dominant culture or felt unable to fit well into it, represented a sort of alternative community in which values of emotion, piety, and self-discipline were ranked above those of wealth, honor, and display.(2) Some historians have conceived of Baptist conversion as the commencement of a spiritual journey that, in fact, led initiates away from conformity to southern norms. In this view, new converts to the Baptist faith were required to absent themselves from many of the venues and occasions that had traditionally allowed rural people to build a sense of community, to observe their betters in the act of leadership, and to defer to them as leaders.(3) The historiographical trend, therefore, has been to describe the rise of the Baptists in Virginia as an expression of more or less bitter divisions within communities, centered upon the fundamental question of the proper nature of the social order. Early Virginia Baptists, according to a number of scholars, were more egalitarian in their beliefs and practice than most Virginians, even though they were not social levelers by any means. As such, they found Baptist practice, which promoted lay participation and an uneducated clergy, appealing. At times, some have argued, the Baptist emphasis upon equality placed them in pointed conflict with the hierarchical, patriarchal social order dominated by Virginia's leading planters.(4) A few have suggested that among the most socially disruptive of Baptist practices was their open-armed welcoming of slaves as members and their brief, tentative questioning of the morality of slavery in the immediate post-Revolutionary years--practices that threatened to undermine the most fundamental social ordering principle in the region.(5) Historians have also linked the relatively egalitarian and inclusive nature of Baptist worship to the more radical democratic tendencies of the American Revolution, which the ruling class ultimately sought to curb during the early years of the republic. …

"Notorious in the Neighborhood": An Interracial Family in Early National and Antebellum Virginia

ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1796, THOMAS WEST, AWARE OF THE ILLNESS THAT would kill him just a few months later, wrote his last will and testament. West, a white blacksmith, owned land in both Amherst and Albemarle Counties, including ten half-acre lots in the town of Charlottesville, which amounted roughly to one-fifth of the town at the time of his death. In his will, West named two of his children--James Henry West and Nancy West--as heirs. Both children were free people of color born of a relationship between the elder West and a woman named Priscilla, who at one point in her life had belonged to her children's father. West left all of his land, livestock, and furniture, as well as his eight slaves, to James Henry West and his family. His fourteen-year-old daughter Nancy West was left only the annual interest on forty pounds held by her guardian, local merchant Thomas Bell, until she turned twenty-one, at which time she would receive the principal.(1) Among the witnesses to Thomas West's will was David Isaacs, another local merchant. Isaacs, born in 1760 in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, had immigrated to the United States and moved to Charlottesville sometime in the early 1790s from Richmond, where he and his brother Isaiah had been traders in Cohen and Isaacs, one of the city's largest mercantile firms. Both Jewish, the Isaacses were also among the founders of Beth Shalome, the capital's first synagogue. In Charlottesville, the brothers lived downtown on land rented from Thomas West.(2) While David Isaacs had a direct economic relationship with Thomas West for the few years that he lived in Charlottesville before West's death, he had an even more significant, lasting, and unusual relationship with West's daughter Nancy. Between 1796 and 1817, David Isaacs and Nancy West had seven children together. By the time of David Isaacs's death in 1837 he and Nancy West (who occasionally, though rarely, used Isaacs's last name) had maintained a familial relationship for over forty years and had lived in a single household for seventeen of those years in downtown Charlottesville, where Isaacs owned a mercantile business and West ran a bakery. Between them the couple amassed substantial wealth, and by 1850 Nancy West owned real property valued at $7,000, enough to make her the richest non-white person in Albemarle County.(3) Interracial sex per se was not illegal in early national and antebellum Virginia, but laws prohibiting interracial marriages had been in place since the colonial era and anti-fornication laws punished all offenders having sex outside of marriage whether or not it crossed the color line.(4) In this legal environment, a stable, successful, and familiar couple like David Isaacs and Nancy West--a relationship that, to us, might seem improbable if not impossible for that era--nonetheless thrived. An investigation of their financial dealings, land transactions, and courtroom encounters provides a rare glimpse at how an interracial couple operated and even prospered within the legal and social boundaries of a Virginia that discouraged their sexual activities and frowned upon their family, but which lacked either the motivation or the power to end their relationship. Examining the lives of exceptional couples at the margins like Isaacs and West is essential to understanding the rules of race, sex, gender, and class in the South before the Civil War--and to appreciating that unusual circumstances like theirs came with rules all their own. The example of West and Isaacs also reinforces arguments made in the work of recent historians, who have complicated our understandings of racial and sexual relations in the early national and antebellum South with studies of multiracial families, coerced and consensual interracial sex involving both free people and slaves, and the lives of free people of color. Collectively, these scholars have demonstrated that there were significant gaps between the ideals white southerners often projected about themselves and their world and the experience of life on the ground in their society. …

Meaning (and) materiality: Rethinking contextual analysis through cellar-set houses

In early 17th-century Virginia, three people constructed houses unlike anything built in the Chesapeake before or since. These earthfast structures, owned by men of the “better sort” and framed at the bottom of cellar holes, have thus far defied explanation because of interpretive constraints inherent in the positivist underpinnings of archaeological analysis. This article challenges these constraints by engaging the rich contexts highlighted in recent work by “storytelling” archaeologists through poststructural semiotics. Rather than search for a single driving factor that explains these houses, it is argued that it is only when one grapples with the complexity of the context that one can understand how these houses were constituted by/constitutive of their context.

VILLAGE TENSIONS IN EARLY VIRGINIA: SEX, LAND, AND STATUS AT THE NECK OF LAND IN THE 1620s

The conventional picture of early Virginia suggests an almost exclusively male population, intent on personal profit, ruthlessly ignoring social considerations, lacking stability. This article argues that such a picture is an exaggeration, and draws attention to three communities, the inhabitants of which more closely resembled the rural English societies from which they had come. Particular attention is paid to the Neck of Land in Charles City, upriver from Jamestown close to the falls. The survival of administrative records makes possible an account of this small community between 1613 and 1629, revealing a hamlet of healthy married families whose concerns were sex, land, and status, rather than death and disease or the neighbouring Indian menace; and where stability in the 1620s did not, however, mean the absence of social tensions. Thus the Neck of Land, taken together with the communities at Point Comfort and on the Eastern Shore, demonstrates the inadequacy of current perceptions of early Virginian society.

New Essays on My Ántonia ed. by Sharon O’Brien

b o o k Review s 479 legacy and blacks themselves invisible,” Fishkin quits the perfor­ mance and, after one last look at the river and its radiant promise, quits Hannibal to pick up her search in Elmira, Hartford, and in the constant vivifying of Twain and his image in popular culture (40). As the culm ination of her fact-finding journey into Twain country, Fishkin assembles her thoughts into an entertaining and illuminating book that is as accessible to readers as Huck’s straight­ forward vernacular. In the end, Fishkin’s defense of her literary mentor, Mark Twain, becomes a defense of fiction itself; focusing on the continued controversies surrounding The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Fishkin pleads for “irreverence” (122, 186) in the mind of readers (school children especially), who must know the truth in order to “straighten out the mess we’ve made of the world” (122). Finally, Fishkin reminds us that to read Twain closely, as Twain read the river, is to be forward-looking: to risk losing the charm of the object in sight, perhaps, though only as a necessary means to opening up the possibility of ultimately gaining “more than we lose” (125). Readers of Fishkin’s book will enjoy journey­ ing along on her retrospective and “forward-looking” search for “the Am erican” Mark Twain. And while sitting with Fishkin in the “Mark Twain Diner,” readers will learn the truth of the man who defines him self in his own perceptions of America. As Fishkin reminds us, Twain “insisted on taking Am erica seriously, and he insisted on not taking Am erica seriously” (203). Fishkin’s book is a valuable addition to Twain studies, as it helps readers to see better and more clearly the irony of his insights, while becoming better able to see themselves in the persistent and still relevant truths inherent in the man “Mark Twain” and his works. New E ssays on My Antonia. Edited by Sharon O ’Brien. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 140 pages, $17.95. Reviewed by George F. Day University of Northern Iowa, Waterloo This is the latest volume in Cambridge University’s “The American Novel” series. The announced purpose of these books is to provide critical guides to great works of American literature and to cre­ ate “a forum of interpretative methods and of the best contemporary ideas” (x). There being no shortage of Cather criticism these days, the con­ tributors to this collection are compelled to serve up new and provoca­ tive approaches to a novel for which Cather felt a special affinity. They are successful in doing this, and their work does indeed reflect some of 4 8 0 WAL 3 4 .4 WINTER 2 0 0 0 the important critical methods of our time. The volume opens with a long, superbly written introduction by editor Sharon O ’Brien. An excellent account of the history of M } Antonia, it covers C ather’s writing career up to 1918, examines in detail the circumstances surrounding publication, and illustrates C ather’s persistent struggle to m aintain her novel’s aesthetic integrity. O ’Brien concludes this by discussing critical attitudes toward the novel from the time it was first published up to and including the four essays in this collection. O ’Brien’s introduction is the best part of the book. Clear and succinct, it is a valuable record that is well worth reading. The first essay in the collection, “Time, Change, and the Burden of Revision” by Miles Orvell examines Cather’s literary relationship with Sarah Orne Jewett and draws a comparison between The Country of the Pointed Firs and M 51 Antonia. Orvell concludes that Cather’s novel is, in effect, a “revision” of Jewett’s work, partly because of Cather’s concern with time, which anticipates the premier concern of many modern writers. Thus Orvell considers Cather’s fic­ tion to be a unique blend of regionalism, naturalism, and modernism. Cather’s regionalism is given a new twist by Elizabeth Ammons, who speculates that the early Virginia years of Cather influenced her powerfully in a number of different ways. Am m ons’s essay, “M 7 Antonia and Afro-Am erican A...

Commercial Space as Consumption Arena: Retail Stores in Early Virginia

Commercial Space as Consumption Arena: Retail Stores in Early Virginia

The Character of a Landscape: Domestic Architecture and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Berkeley Parish, Virginia

Following the instructions for the 1798 Federal Direct Tax, Waller Holladay, assistant assessor for Berkeley Parish, Virginia, evaluated 226 estates within his community. His accounts offer insight into not only the structures on the properties but also the people who built and lived in them. Dominated by wooden buildings and lacking any slave quarters, the estates of Berkeley Parish challenge previous portrayals of plantations and illustrate a variety of architectural choices. In doing so, they indicate cultural and social processes different from those associated with conventional interpretations. Rather than debunking these narratives, however, the material life of Berkeley Parish questions their primacy by suggesting a wider array of possibilities from which to consider status, women, and master-slave relations in early Virginia.

Diversity and Accommodation: Essays on the Cultural Composition of the Virginia Frontier.

Focusing on the early Virginia frontier, the essays in Diversity and Accommodation stress the importance of cultural pluralism in backcountry society and the need to replace stereotypical images with realistic conclusions based on a detailed case-study approach. The contributors to this collection argue that traditional views - of ethnic and cultural isolation, of German clannishness and Scots-Irish individualism - contain a kernel of truth but are far too restrictive and simplistic. While acknowledging that distinct ethnic and cultural groups did exist on the Virginia frontier and that their effect on the development and heritage of the region was significant, these scholars show that accommodation, adaptation, exchange, and coexistence among such groups played a more important part in the cultural dynamics of the area than previous studies have indicated. Drawing on the methods and findings of various disciplines - including social history, archaeology, ethnic studies, and material culture studies - the essays encompass key aspects and phases of the Virginia frontier experience. Among the topics covered are the earliest trade relationships between English Virginians and the Native American societies, the impact of immigrants from Ulster and the Rhineland, the African American presence and the nature of slavery in the region, and the development of community ties in southwest Virginia. The final section examines the ways in which backcountry architecture reflected both the early settlers' backgrounds as well as their adaptations to their new environment. With their fresh insights and innovative analysis, the essays in Diversity and Accommodation make an important contribution to thegrowing body of scholarship on the role of the frontier and backcountry regions in American history.

The Structure of Civic Exchange: Market Houses in Early Virginia

The Structure of Civic Exchange: Market Houses in Early Virginia

A Response: The Forest and the Trees: Thomas Camfield and the History of Early Virginia

A Response: The Forest and the Trees: Thomas Camfield and the History of Early Virginia

A Can or Two of Worms: Virginia Bernhard and the Historiography of Early Virginia, 1607-1610

A Can or Two of Worms: Virginia Bernhard and the Historiography of Early Virginia, 1607-1610

An Early Archaic Toolkit from Virginia

This article presents an analysis of a single find of an Early Archaic Virginia toolkit containing Nottoway River point types and associated tools. The toolkit offers an excellent opportunity to examine a probable single-user toolkit as well as to determine what tools constitute the toolkit make-up. The toolkit is described and illustrated. The single-user aspects and implications for an analysis of an individual in prehistory are examined.

"Men, Women and Children" at Jamestown: Population and Gender in Early Virginia, 1607-1610

"Men, Women and Children" at Jamestown: Population and Gender in Early Virginia, 1607-1610