Author: Ruth SparacioPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Court records
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Lancaster County, Virginia Order Book
Author: Ruth SparacioPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Court records
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs
Author: Kathleen M. BrownPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807838292
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 518
Book Description
Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity. In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.
Genealogies of Virginia Families
Author: Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com
ISBN: 0806309474
Category : Registers of births, etc
Languages : en
Pages : 3680
Book Description
From Tyler's quarterly historical and genealogical magazine.
The Widow Washington
Author: Martha SaxtonPublisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374721335
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212
Book Description
An insightful biography of Mary Ball Washington, the mother of our nation's father The Widow Washington is the first life of Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother, based on archival sources. Her son’s biographers have, for the most part, painted her as self-centered and crude, a trial and an obstacle to her oldest child. But the records tell a very different story. Mary Ball, the daughter of a wealthy planter and a formerly indentured servant, was orphaned young and grew up working hard, practicing frugality and piety. Stepping into Virginia’s upper class, she married an older man, the planter Augustine Washington, with whom she had five children before his death eleven years later. As a widow deprived of most of her late husband’s properties, Mary struggled to raise her children, but managed to secure them places among Virginia’s elite. In her later years, she and her wealthy son George had a contentious relationship, often disagreeing over money, with George dismissing as imaginary her fears of poverty and helplessness. Yet Mary Ball Washington had a greater impact on George than mothers of that time and place usually had on their sons. George did not have the wealth or freedom to enjoy the indulged adolescence typical of young men among the planter class. Mary’s demanding mothering imbued him with many of the moral and religious principles by which he lived. The two were strikingly similar, though the commanding demeanor, persistence, athleticism, penny-pinching, and irascibility that they shared have served the memory of the country’s father immeasurably better than that of his mother. Martha Saxton’s The Widow Washington is a necessary and deeply insightful corrective, telling the story of Mary’s long, arduous life on its own terms, and not treating her as her son’s satellite.
A "Topping People"
Author: Emory G. EvansPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813930375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472
Book Description
A "Topping People" is the first comprehensive study of the political, economic, and social elite of colonial Virginia. Evans studies twenty-one leading families from their rise to power in the late 1600s to their downfall over one hundred years later. These families represented the upper echelons of power, serving in the upper and lower houses of the General Assembly, often as speaker of the House of Burgesses. Their names—Randolph, Robinson, Byrd, Carter, Corbin, Custis, Nelson, and Page, to note but a few—are still familiar in the Old Dominion some three hundred years later. Their decline was due to a variety of factors—economic, social, and demographic. The third generations showed an inability to adapt their business philosophies to the changing economic climate. Their inclination was to mirror the English landed gentry, living off the income of their landed estates. Economic diversification was the norm early on, but it became less effective after 1730. Scots traders, for example, introduced chain stores, making it more difficult to continue family-run stores. And land speculation was no substitute for diversification. An increase in population resulted in the creation of new counties, which weakened the influence of the Tidewater region. These leading families began to spend more than they earned and became heavily indebted to British mercantile firms. The Revolution only served to make matters worse, and by 1790 these families had lost their political and economic status, although their social status remained. A "Topping People" is a thorough and engrossing study of the way families came to gain and, eventually, lose great power in this turbulent and progressive period in American history.
"Esteemed Bookes of Lawe" and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia
Author: Warren M. BillingsPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813939402
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Book Description
Virginia men of law constituted one of the first learned professions in colonial America, and Virginia legal culture had an important and lasting impact on American political institutions and jurisprudence. Exploring the book collections of these Virginians therefore offers insight into the history of the book and the intellectual history of early America. It also addresses essential questions of how English culture migrated to the American colonies and was transformed into a distinctive American culture. Focusing on the law books that colonial Virginians acquired, how they used them, and how they eventually produced a native-grown legal literature, this collection explores the law and intellectual culture of the Commonwealth and reveals the origins of a distinctively Virginian legal literature. The contributors argue that understanding the development of early Virginia legal history—as shown through these book collections—not only illuminates important aspects of Virginia’s history and culture; it also underlies a thorough understanding of colonial and revolutionary American history and culture.
History and genealogy of Peter Montague, of Nansemond and Lancaster Counties, Virginia, and his descendants, 1621-1894
Author: G.W. MontaguePublisher: Рипол Классик
ISBN: 5882189020
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 585
Book Description
The Courthouses of Early Virginia
Author: Carl LounsburyPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813923017
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Book Description
Court day in early Virginia transformed crossroads towns into forums for citizens of all social classes to transact a variety of business, from legal cases heard before the county magistrates to horse races, ballgames, and the sale and barter of produce, clothing, food, and drink. The Courthouses of Early Virginia is the first comprehensive history of the public buildings that formed the nucleus of this space and the important private buildings that grew up around them.
A Booker Family of Virginia
Author: James Motley BookerPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Essex County (Va.)
Languages : en
Pages : 576
Book Description
The early members of this Booker family lived in the parishes of Petsworth, Kingston, and Abingdon, Gloucester Co., Virginia. The earliest proven ancestor, James Booker (ca. 1723-1794, son of James and Amy Lewis Booker, married around 1745 Elizabeth Howlett (1726-1760); (2) Ann Camm (1723-1774/75), daughter of John and Mary Bullock Camm, ca. 1764; and (3) Elizabeth, widow of Ambrose Wright (her second husband). She was first married to Ambrose Bohannon. James Booker had six children by his first wife, Amy Lewis Booker. Family members and descendants live in Virginia, North Dakota, Illinois, Texas, Ohio, Georgia and elsewhere. Includes autobiography of the author, James Motley Booker (b. 1914).
The Abridged Compendium of American Genealogy
Author: Frederick Adams VirkusPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Patriotic societies
Languages : en
Pages : 650
Book Description