Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia

Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia
Author: Warren M. Billings
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2010-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807147036

Sir William Berkeley (1605--1677) influenced colonial Virginia more than any other man of his era, diversifying Virginia's trade with international markets, serving as a model for the planter aristocracy, and helping to establish American self-rule. An Oxford-educated playwright, soldier, and diplomat, Berkeley won appointment as governor of Virginia in 1641 after a decade in the court of King Charles I. Between his arrival in Jamestown and his death, Berkeley became Virginia's leading politician and planter, indelibly stamping his ambitions, accomplishments, and, ultimately, his failures upon the colony. In this masterly biography, Warren M. Billings offers the first full-scale treatment of Berkeley's life, revealing the extent to which Berkeley shaped early Virginia and linking his career to the wider context of seventeenth-century Anglo-American history.

The Divided Dominion

The Divided Dominion
Author: Ethan A. Schmidt
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2015-04-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1607323087

In The Divided Dominion, Ethan A. Schmidt examines the social struggle that created Bacon's Rebellion, focusing on the role of class antagonism in fostering violence toward native people in seventeenth-century Virginia. This provocative volume places a dispute among Virginians over the permissibility of eradicating Native Americans for land at the forefront in understanding this pivotal event. Myriad internal and external factors drove Virginians to interpret their disputes with one another increasingly along class lines. The decades-long tripartite struggle among elite whites, non-elite whites, and Native Americans resulted in the development of mutually beneficial economic and political relationships between elites and Native Americans. When these relationships culminated in the granting of rights—equal to those of non-elite white colonists—to Native Americans, the elites crossed a line and non-elite anger boiled over. A call for the annihilation of all Indians in Virginia united different non-elite white factions and molded them in widespread social rebellion. The Divided Dominion places Indian policy at the heart of Bacon's Rebellion, revealing the complex mix of social, cultural, and racial forces that collided in Virginia in 1676. This new analysis will interest students and scholars of colonial and Native American history.

Samuel Wiseman's Book of Record

Samuel Wiseman's Book of Record
Author: Samuel Wiseman
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780739135303

In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led a well-known colonial uprising against the authority of King Charles II, in the person of Virginia's governor Sir William Berkeley. Bacon's Rebellion dramatically altered relations between Chesapeake colonists and Native Americans, and also induced late Stuart imperialists to crack down on colonial autonomy. Michael Leroy Oberg has transcribed, edited, and introduced the official record left by Samuel Wiseman, King Charles II's scribe assigned to this uprising's investigation_making this history widely available for the first time in book form.

No Wood, No Kingdom

No Wood, No Kingdom
Author: Keith Pluymers
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2021-05-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812299558

In early modern England, wood scarcity was a widespread concern. Royal officials, artisans, and common people expressed their fears in laws, petitions, and pamphlets, in which they debated the severity of the problem, speculated on its origins, and proposed solutions to it. No Wood, No Kingdom explores these conflicting attempts to understand the problem of scarcity and demonstrates how these ideas shaped land use, forestry, and the economic vision of England's earliest colonies. Popular accounts have often suggested that deforestation served as a "push" for English colonial expansion. Keith Pluymers shows that wood scarcity in England, rather than a problem of absolute supply and demand, resulted from social conflict over the right to define and regulate resources, difficulties obtaining accurate information, and competing visions for trade, forestry, and the English landscape. Domestic scarcity claims did encourage schemes to develop wood-dependent enterprises in the colonies, but in practice colonies competed with domestic enterprises rather than supplanting them. Moreover, close studies of colonial governments and the actions of individual landholders in Ireland, Virginia, Bermuda, and Barbados demonstrate that colonists experimented with different, often competing approaches to colonial woods and trees, including efforts to manage them as long-term resources, albeit ones that nonetheless brought significant transformations to the land. No Wood, No Kingdom explores the efforts to knot together woods around the Atlantic basin as resources for an English empire and the deep underlying conflicts and confusion that largely frustrated those plans. It speaks to historians of early modern Europe, early America, and the Atlantic World but also offers key insights on early modern resource politics, forest management, and political ecology of interest to readers in the environmental humanities and social sciences as well as those interested in colonialism or economic history.

"Esteemed Bookes of Lawe" and the Legal Culture of Early Virginia

Author: Warren M. Billings
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2017-02-24
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0813939402

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 of the Colonial Virginia (3 Volumes Edition)

History of the Colonial Virginia (3 Volumes Edition)
Author: Thomas J. Wertenbaker
Publisher: Good Press
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2023-12-14
Genre: History
ISBN:

Thomas J. Wertenbaker's 'History of Colonial Virginia' is a seminal work that explores the foundational history of the Virginia colony in three comprehensive volumes. Wertenbaker delves into the political, social, and economic aspects of Colonial Virginia, providing a detailed account of the settlers, Native American interactions, and the development of the colony's unique culture. His meticulous research and engaging narrative style make this book an essential contribution to the understanding of early American history. Wertenbaker's work is a key text in the study of colonial America, providing valuable insights into the origins of the United States. The depth of his analysis and the clarity of his prose make this three-volume edition a must-read for historians and enthusiasts alike.