Author: Marion TinlingPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Statesmen
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Book Description
The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684-1776
Author: Marion TinlingPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Statesmen
Languages : en
Pages : 456
Book Description
The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of Westover, Virginia, 1684-1776
Author: William ByrdPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Statesmen
Languages : en
Pages : 504
Book Description
The Commonplace Book of William Byrd II of Westover
Author: Kevin Joel BerlandPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807839116
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
Book Description
William Byrd II (1674-1744) was an important figure in the history of colonial Virginia: a founder of Richmond, an active participant in Virginia politics, and the proprietor of one of the colony's greatest plantations. But Byrd is best known today for his diaries. Considered essential documents of private life in colonial America, they offer readers an unparalleled glimpse into the world of a Virginia gentleman. This book joins Byrd's Diary, Secret Diary, and other writings in securing his reputation as one of the most interesting men in colonial America. Edited and presented here for the first time, Byrd's commonplace book is a collection of moral wit and wisdom gleaned from reading and conversation. The nearly six hundred entries range in tone from hope to despair, trust to dissimulation, and reflect on issues as varied as science, religion, women, Alexander the Great, and the perils of love. A ten-part introduction presents an overview of Byrd's life and addresses such topics as his education and habits of reading and his endeavors to understand himself sexually, temperamentally, and religiously, as well as the history and cultural function of commonplacing. Extensive annotations discuss the sources, background, and significance of the entries.
The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover
Author: Kevin Joel BerlandPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469606941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 527
Book Description
After his 1728 Virginia-North Carolina boundary expedition, Virginia planter and politician William Byrd II composed two very different accounts of his adventures. The Secret History of the Line was written for private circulation, offering tales of scandalous behavior and political misconduct, peppered with rakish humor and personal satire. The History of the Dividing Line, continually revised by Byrd for decades after the expedition, was intended for the London literary market, though not published in his lifetime. Collating all extant manuscripts, Kevin Joel Berland's landmark scholarly edition of these two histories provides wide-ranging historical and cultural contexts for both, helping to recreate the social and intellectual ethos of Byrd and his time. Byrd enriched his narratives with material appropriated from earlier authors, many of whose works were in his library--the most extensive in the American colonies. Berland identifies for the first time many of Byrd's sources and raises the question: how reliable are histories that build silently upon antecedent texts and present borrowed material as firsthand testimony? In his analysis, Berland demonstrates the need for a new category to assess early modern history writing: the hybrid, accretional narrative.
William Byrd II and His Lost History
Author: Margaret Beck PritchardPublisher: Colonial Williamsburg
ISBN: 9780879350888
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
An 18th century copperplate illustration, discovered in Oxford in 1929, was used to guide the restoration and reconstruction of several Williamsburg buildings. This information was appreciated but a discovery was made when more copperplates which came to light in 1986 were linked to the 1929 Oxford copperplate. This book pieces together the mystery of when, how, and why these copperplates were made. The authors link these illustrations to texts written (and to texts now lost) by one of the most prominent Virginians of this period, William Byrd II. Byrd (1674-1744) was a prominent plantation-owner, author, romantic scoundrel, and politician who is generally seen as the founder of the city of Richmond.
Moravian Americans and their Neighbors, 1772-1822
Author: Ulrike WiethausPublisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004517863
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 508
Book Description
A multidisciplinary examination of Moravian Americanization in the Early Republic with a special focus on assimilation, innovation, and racialized segregation.
Ploughshares Into Swords
Author: James SidburyPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521598606
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
During the summer of 1800, slaves in and around Richmond conspired to overthrow their masters and abolish slavery. This book uses Gabriel's Conspiracy, and the evidence produced during the repression of the revolt, to expose the processes through which Virginians of African descent built an oppositional culture. Sidbury portrays the rich cultures of eighteenth-century black Virginians, and the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, senses of identity that emerged among enslaved and free people living in and around the rapidly growing state capital. The book also examines the conspirators' vision of themselves as God's chosen people, and the complicated African and European roots of their culture. In so doing, it offers an alternative interpretation of the meaning of the Virginia that was home to so many of the Founding Fathers. This narrative focuses on the history and perspectives of black and enslaved people, in order to develop 'Gabriel's Virginia' as a counterpoint to more common discussions of 'Jeffersonian Virginia'.
Ginseng Diggers
Author: Luke MangetPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813183820
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304
Book Description
The harvesting of wild American ginseng (panax quinquefolium), the gnarled, aromatic herb known for its therapeutic and healing properties, is deeply established in North America and has played an especially vital role in the southern and central Appalachian Mountains. Traded through a trans-Pacific network that connected the region to East Asian markets, ginseng was but one of several medicinal Appalachian plants that entered international webs of exchange. As the production of patent medicines and botanical pharmaceutical products escalated in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, southern Appalachia emerged as the United States' most prolific supplier of many species of medicinal plants. The region achieved this distinction because of its biodiversity and the persistence of certain common rights that guaranteed widespread access to the forested mountainsides, regardless of who owned the land. Following the Civil War, root digging and herb gathering became one of the most important ways landless families and small farmers earned income from the forest commons. This boom influenced class relations, gender roles, forest use, and outside perceptions of Appalachia, and began a widespread renegotiation of common rights that eventually curtailed access to ginseng and other plants. Based on extensive research into the business records of mountain entrepreneurs, country stores, and pharmaceutical companies, Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia is the first book to unearth the unique relationship between the Appalachian region and the global trade in medicinal plants. Historian Luke Manget expands our understanding of the gathering commons by exploring how and why Appalachia became the nation's premier purveyor of botanical drugs in the late-nineteenth century and how the trade influenced the way residents of the region interacted with each other and the forests around them.
Patrick Henry
Author: Jon KuklaPublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439190836
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 732
Book Description
“A brilliant orator, a firebrand for freedom and individual rights, Henry stands as an American luminary, and Kukla’s magisterial biography shines the glow of achievement on subject and author alike” (Richmond Times Dispatch). Patrick Henry restores its subject, long underappreciated in history as a founding father, to his seminal place in the story of American independence. Patrick Henry is best known for his fiery declaration, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” Born in 1736, he became an attorney and planter before being elected as the first governor of Virginia after independence, winning reelection several times. After declining to attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Henry opposed the Constitution, arguing that it granted too much power to the central government. He pushed vigorously for the ten amendments to the new Constitution, and then supported Washington and national unity against the bitter party divisions of the 1790s. Henry denounced slavery as evil, but he accepted its continuation. Henry was enormously influential in his time, but many of his accomplishments were subsequently all but forgotten. Jon Kukla’s “detailed, compelling…definitive” (Kirkus Reviews) biography restores Henry and his Virginia compatriots to the front rank of advocates for American independence. Kukla has thoroughly researched Henry’s life, even living on one of Henry’s estates. He brings both newly discovered documents and new insights to Henry, the Revolution, the Constitutional era, and the early Republic. This “informational and enlightening biography of the great agitator for democracy” (Library Journal) is a vital contribution to our understanding of the nation’s founding.
The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution
Author: D. H. RobinsonPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019260788X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system, European civilisation, and Britain's position within both, Robinson shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately, outside - the emerging British Empire. Taking in more than two centuries of Atlantic history, he explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740-1763, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the between 1763 and 1775. In the process, Robinson sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the Anglicisation/Americanisation debate, the political economy of empire, early American art and poetry, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs, nationalism, and revolution. What emerges from this story is an American Revolution that seems both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century.