Rhys Isaac is among foremost practitioners of His 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, introduced students of early America to an extraordinarily fruitful dialogue between historians and anthropologists. Using metaphors drawn from theater to translate simultaneously across cultural and temporal distance, book was a breakthrough study of the meanings that inhabitants of other worlds have given to their own everyday customs. It represented a touchstone text in what would shortly be called New Cultural History, a subgenre of historical writing heavily indebted to readings of Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology. At its heart was a simple, democratizing program of enquiry: people doing things, and finding ways to interpret statements made by what they did and style of their doing. From this basic approach would emerge a sort of ethnographic everybody's history-of women and men, of blacks and whites, of gentry and common folk.' In his latest book, Rhys Isaac has chosen instead to write someone's history. Where The Transformation of Virginia rendered colonial and revolutionary history through encompassing social landscapes of Chesapeake region, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom uses a remarkable diary to show how American Revolution entered world of a lone eighteenthcentury patriarch. In many respects book can be read as flipside of old feminist axiom that personal is political; here, political is shown to be deeply personal. Landon Carter's diary has long been an indispensable source for history of colonial Virginia, but this is first time it has received such thorough treatment. Situating Carter and his journal in both expressive conventions of its time and in changing context of colonial politics, book provides brilliant insights into life experience of Virginia planter during an extended period of existential angst.