Eighteenth-Century Virginia Research Articles

Lanarkshire House, Glasgow: The Evolution and Regeneration of a 'Merchant City' Landmark

In 1997 Lanarkshire House (Fig. 1), located on Ingram Street in the ‘Merchant City’ and one of Glasgow’s landmark buildings, was vacated by the High Court and put up for sale. The present structure stands on the site of the renowned eighteenth-century Virginia Mansion and was created over several decades in the nineteenth century by three (or perhaps four) of the city’s leading architects. The original building was designed in the early 1840s for the Glasgow and Ship Bank by David Hamilton (1768–1843), the ‘Father of architecture in the West of Scotland’. It subsequently became the office of the Union Bank of Scotland and was altered by James Salmon Senior (1805–88) in the 1850s and underwent major redevelopment twenty years later under John Burnet Senior (1814–1901), possibly with the assistance of his son John James (1857–1938). The Union Bank operated from the site until the 1920s when it moved to St Vincent Street and its old building was occupied by Lanark County Council’s offices and latterly the courts.

From Calabar to Carter's Grove: the history of a Virginia slave community

Colonial Williamsburg is known internationally for the history it teaches to visitors to the restored capital of eighteenth-century Virginia. Research undertaken by Williamsburg historians, archaeologists, art and architecture historians, curators, and other staff members stands behind the educational programs. book is the first of a series grounded in that research and devoted to major themes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chesapeake culture. This is an unusual and particularly valuable approach to early black history. Walsh effectively uses diverse records and artifacts, along with the ever-growing secondary literature on plantation slavery, to construct a dynamic view of change over time and across generations. She argues convincingly that one can analyze the experience of discrete groups of slaves using interconnected local records and resources. -- Peter H. Wood, Duke University In From Calabar to Carter's Grove, Lorena S. Walsh has done what conventional wisdom has deemed nearly impossible: she has assembled a substantial history of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia slave community. Detailed, multigenerational histories of small slave groups can seldom be reconstructed for the antebellum era, except for a few unusual plantations where extraordinarily good records survive. The laborers originally belonging to tidewater's aristocratic Burwell family were, as Walsh discovered, a diverse group of Virginia-born slaves, newly enslaved Africans, and, for a time, white indentured servants. Over the years this slave community shifted and grew, frequently altered by the marriages, deaths, and estate settlements of their owners and augmented by their owngrowing families. Yet during these two centuries the majority of the Burwell slaves remained in or near tidewater Virginia. Walsh's analysis of existing plantation records, artifacts, and ruins has generated a clear and frequently detailed picture of these slaves, including lists of popular forenames and accounts of illnesses, childbirths, and escape attempts. However, as the author is first to admit, this book does not -- and based on the available evidence, cannot -- offer portraits of individual slaves; it is instead a collective portrait of the group, offering details of their African origins, slave histories, and daily hardships. Enhanced with maps, drawings, and photographs, From Calabar to Carter's Grove is an innovative study that paves the way for similar research on other slave communities. volume will be invaluable not only to historians but to anyone with an interest in antebellum or African-American history.

Varieties of Southern History: New Essays on a Region and Its People

Introduction The Social Sciences and Southern History Stories of Enslavement: A Person-Centered Ethnography from an Eighteenth-Century Virginia Plantation by Rhys Isaac Texts, Texture, and Context: Toward an Ethnographic History of Slave Resistance by Charles Joyner Reading the Slave Body: Demeanor, Gesture, and African-American Culture by Shane White and Graham White Deadly Amusements: Spectacle Lynchings and Southern Whiteness, 1890-1940 by Grace Elizabeth Hale Who Were the Victims of Lynching? Evidence from Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881-1940 by Terence Finnegan Southern History through Life History Thomas Thistlewood Becomes a Creole by Trevor Burnard Doing God's Service: Adelbert Ames and Reconstruction in Mississippi by Warren A. Ellem Frank Cushing and W.E.B. Du Bois: Religion, Social Science, and Traveling South in the Late Nineteenth Century by Sam Elworthy Race, Gender, and Modernism: The Case of Lillian Smith by Bruce Clayton Labor in the New South Aspects of Modernization in the Loray Mill Strike of 1929 by John Salmond Coming into the Real World: Southern Textile Workers and the TWUA, 1945-1951 by Timothy J. Minchin Bibliographical Essay Index

Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (review)

Reviews103 Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery. ByJohn Michael Vlach. University of North Carolina Press, 1993. 258 pp. Cloth, $37.50; paper, $18.95. Reviewed by Thomas W. Hanchett, who earned his Ph.D. in history at the University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently Andrew D. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in southern studies at Emory University. He is author of "The Rosenwald Schools and Black Education in North Carolina" in the North Carolina Historical Review. All too often, architecture buffs interested in the plantations of the pre-Civil War South have focused only on the grand homes of the planters. Early in this century, when local landmark groups began moving to preserve important structures from the era of slavery, they saved the mansions but often let the outbuildings fall away. The result has been a skewed image of history, a loss of understanding of the plantation as a working farm. Equally important, selective preservation has obscured the vital role of African Americans as the plantation labor force—the South's main economic engine. A joke that made the rounds among museum directors during the 1980s perfectly captured the resulting myopia. After a tour of a particularly grand antebellum plantation house, an appreciative couple is said to have remarked, "Wonderful place! Do you know if they had any help?" In Back of the Big House, John Michael Vlach takes a step toward redressing that imbalance. Vlach, a professor of folklore and American studies at George Washington University, is well known among scholars of the built environment for his work on African American architecture and design. His pathbreaking research into the origins of the commonplace "shotgun" house suggested its links to Haitian and West African building customs , and his book Charleston Blacksmith documented the still-vibrant African-influenced decorative arts tradition practiced by South Carolina metalworker Philip Simmons. Now Vlach has turned his attention to the everyday buildings of the antebellum plantation— kitchens, smokehouses, stables, house servants' quarters, and the cabins of field hands— with an interest in seeing them through the eyes of both the planters and the slaves. Vlach begins by assessing the relative significance of the plantation in the experiences of white and black southerners before the Civil War. Plantations constituted only a tiny minority of southern farms. Only 24 percent of all white southern families owned slaves, and only 12 percent of those owned twenty or more. Vlach traces the image of the plantation to eighteenth-century Virginia, where a handful of extremely wealthy secondand third-generation families created the first American plantations on the model of English manors. Virginia estates provided the prototypes for builders in the South's three main plantation regions of the early nineteenth century—the Atlantic coastal plain, the fertile lands of the lower Mississippi River, and upland South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. In reality, only plantations with a hundred or more slaves achieved the Virginia model of grandeur, and they probably numbered no more than two thousand across the entire South. But for white families on smaller farms, these showplaces served as cultural beacons, symbols of the opportunity that the slave economy offered. While few whites lived on the fabled southern plantation, the vast farms were home to the majority of the region's blacks, including some 62 percent of slaves. The estates thus provided the primary landscape in which Africans forged an African American culture. Vlach's main tool for visualizing this landscape is the trove of photos and measured drawings created since 1933 by the Historic American Building Survey (HABS). Begun as a New Deal project to put architectural draftsmen and photographers back to 104Southern Cultures work, HABS continues to assemble teams of students and part-time professionals each year to document significant structures across the nation. The HABS collection at the Library of Congress includes images from dozens of major plantations . While planters' houses, not surprisingly, have received the most scrutiny, the archive also includes information on numerous outbuildings, many of which have now disappeared. Vlach's aim was to pull together, analyze , and publish this important body of data. HABS photographs and drawings make up the meat of Back of the Big...

The Planter's Prospect: Houses, Outbuildings, and Rural Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

The Planter's Prospect: Houses, Outbuildings, and Rural Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

The dream as a tool for historical research: Reexamining life in eighteenth-century Virginia through the dreams of a gentleman: William Byrd, II, 1674–1744.

The dream as a tool for historical research: Reexamining life in eighteenth-century Virginia through the dreams of a gentleman: William Byrd, II, 1674–1744.

The World they made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.

The World they made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.

The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, by Mechal Sobel

<i>The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia</i>, by Mechal Sobel

Anglican Parish Churches in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Anglican Parish Churches in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Popular Influence upon Public Policy: Petitioning in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Bailey examines a little-known but highly significant governmental mechanism in eighteenth-century Virginia: the right of every citizen to petition the Virginia assembly for redress of grievances.

Popular Influence upon Public Policy: Petitioning in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Contributions in Legal Studies.

Popular Influence upon Public Policy: Petitioning in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Contributions in Legal Studies.

Robert Munford and the Political Culture of Frontier Virginia

Robert Munford, the eighteenth-century Virginia squire and litterateur, has long served as both a symbol and subject of analysis for students of colonial American history and culture. In the nearly-barren ground of eighteenth-century American drama, Munford's plays, The Candidates and The Patriots, while never actually produced on stage during his lifetime, stand out as two of the most important attempts by a colonial American to use traditional dramatic techniques to illustrate distinctively American characters and themes. And for historians, these same two plays, which grew out of Munford's own experience in Virginia politics, have served as rich and evocative sources from which to reconstruct the operation and ethos of the political culture of revolutionary Virginia.

Britain and America - The cultural tradition

From the early days of Jamestown or Plymouth the cultural relationship between England and America has been, and indeed still is, complex, and at times surprisingly capricious. In the eighteenth century Virginia adopted with alacrity the highly developed industry of horse-racing which was imported from Britain, from the jockey’s silk to brood mares and stallions. New York accepted with equal alacrity the commercialized sport of pugilism and we should remember that all the antics of promotion practised by Muhammed Ali —apart from fighting a Japanese wrestler—were commonplaces of this English eighteenth-century sport; indeed, they stemmed from it. But other games that England invented at that time, and in which the British took immense delight, the Americans rejected. Cricket scarcely took root, struggling along in a very sub-fuse way for two centuries. The colonists preferred the English child’s game of rounders, complicated by statistics, in spite of the fact that cricket is even more statistic prone than baseball, and a far better game for gambling. As with cricket, so with football. America took over the schoolboys’ game and turned it into a sport for dinosaurs, ignoring in the nineteenth century the game of soccer, of far greater skill and aesthetic delight, which swept the world. Last month, however, the Yankee Stadium was filled with fifty-five thousand people who had come to watch England play Italy at soccer. True, most of them booed England and cheered Italy, for they were mainly Italians, however, no-one could deny that the game itself was essentially British. Tennis and golf are, of course, both British; so, on cultural balance, America has been indebted to Britain for most of its games these last two hundred years.

Slaves and Shipping in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Slaves and Shipping in Eighteenth-Century Virginia As the outlines of the Atlantic slave trade are becoming better known, the rather special nature of the North American sector is becoming more clearly defined. The most obvious fact about this trade is that it was relatively minor compared with the West Indian and Brazilian trades in the same period. Also, unlike the Brazilian and Cuban trades, the British North American trade was mostly an eighteenth-century phenomenon which involved direct African importation only for part of that century. The three most important North American zones of importation throughout most of the eighteenth century were Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. Although Virginia was the largest of the continental slave societies, it ranked second in importance to South Carolina as an importer of slaves. Nevertheless, the abundance and quality of the available data make this colony the best with which to begin a comprehensive study of the dynamics of the slave trade to the region which would form the United States. The sources for this study are the materials gathered almost forty years ago by Elizabeth Donnan in her famous documentary collection on the Atlantic slave trade. Although scholars have had access to her study for some time, there has been no comprehensive analysis undertaken of the records that she has reprinted.' The aim of this study is to analyze these records both to determine the internal dynamics of the slave trade to Virginia in terms of routes and shipping, and to place that trade with its sources, volume, ship's slave-carrying capacity, frequency of voyage, and tonnage patterns within the context of the general structure of the entire Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century.

Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.

Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.

Stanley Feldstein, and Introduction by Thomas P. Govan, Once a Slave: The Slaves' View of SlaveryGerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsStanley Feldstein, and Introduction by Thomas P. Govan, Once a Slave: The Slaves' View of Slavery Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century VirginiaRobert McColleyRobert McColley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 57, Number 4October 1972 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2716990 Journal History This article was published in The Journal of Negro History (1916-2001), which is continued by The Journal of African American History (2002-present). Copyright 1972 The Association for the Study of African American Life and HistoryPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Eighteenth-Century Cultural Process in Delaware Valley Folk Building

Previous articleNext article No AccessEighteenth-Century Cultural Process in Delaware Valley Folk BuildingHenry GlassieHenry Glassie Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Winterthur Portfolio Volume 71972 Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495804 Views: 18Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1972 The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur MuseumPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Brian D. Crane Language, Church, Material Culture, and Identity among Eighteenth-Century Swedish Descendant Communities in the Delaware Valley Region, Historical Archaeology 56, no.11 (Nov 2021): 104–130.https://doi.org/10.1007/s41636-021-00312-5Meghann E. Jack An Architecture of Closeness: The Ross Family Double Farmhouse in St. Mary’s, Nova Scotia, Material Culture Review 90-91 (Apr 2021): 59–89.https://doi.org/10.7202/1076798arRichard MacKinnon Heritage Conservation, UNESCO and Intangible Cultural Heritage in Eastern Canada, Ethnologies 36, no.1-21-2 (Oct 2016): 383–403.https://doi.org/10.7202/1037614arFredrik Ekengren Materialities on the Move: Identity and Material Culture Among the Forest Finns in Seventeenth-Century Sweden and America, (Jan 2013): 147–165.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6202-6_9Angèle Smith Mapped Landscapes: The Politics of Metaphor, Knowledge, and Representation on Nineteenth-Century Irish Ordnance Survey Maps, Historical Archaeology 41, no.11 (Oct 2016): 81–91.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376995Bradford Botwick, Debra A. McClane Landscapes of Resistance: A View of the Nineteenth-Century Chesapeake Bay Oyster Fishery, Historical Archaeology 39, no.33 (Oct 2016): 94–112.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03376696 William Chapman Irreconcilable Differences: Urban Residences in the Danish West Indies, 1700-1900, Winterthur Portfolio 30, no.2/32/3 (Oct 2015): 129–172.https://doi.org/10.1086/wp.30.2_3.4618498 Dell Upton Vernacular Domestic Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, Winterthur Portfolio 17, no.2/32/3 (Oct 2015): 95–119.https://doi.org/10.1086/496075Bushman Richard L. Family Security in the Transition From Farm To City, 1750-1850, Journal of Family History 6, no.33 (Sep 1981): 238–256.https://doi.org/10.1177/036319908100600301