The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company

The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company
Author: Charles Royster
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 648
Release: 1999
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

In this absorbing narrative Charles Royster traces the rise and fall of the eighteenth-century transatlantic culture that was built on the insatiable demand in Europe for Virginia tobacco and the equally insatiable American demand for European manufactured goods. Moving from the plantations of Virginia and Antigua to the warehouses of London and Glasgow, from the Gold Coast of Africa to the valleys of the Allegheny Mountains, from the iron furnaces of southern Wales to the subscribers' room of Lloyd's of London, Professor Royster gives us the story of the Dismal Swamp Company, a fantastically delusional enterprise that proposed draining and developing a vast morass along the Virginia-North Carolina border. Examining the interconnected lives of the company's partners, Royster reveals a colonial order built on a system of cronyism, conspicuous consumption, and debt that seems hauntingly familiar. He writes about the many schemers and dreamers (including George Washington, Robert "King" Carter, two William Byrds, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert Morris) who failed to amass their desired fortunes, and a few realists (Samuel Gist, Dr. Thomas Walker, and Anthony Bacon) who succeeded, but at the dire expense of others. And we see the breakdown of this culture and the transition to a more democratic, though similar, system after the Revolution. Throughout Royster's narrative we seepossessors possessed by their possessions, slaveholders possessed by slavery, and heirs possessed by litigation. Connecting all their stories are their unceasing efforts to make something substantial out of the insubstantial--chief among them the almost unbelievable delusion that fortunes could bemade from the Dismal Swamp.

Challenging History

Challenging History
Author: Leah Worthington
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2021-07-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1643362011

A collection of essays that examine how the history of slavery and race in the United States has been interpreted and inserted at public historic sites For decades racism and social inequity have stayed at the center of the national conversation in the United States, sustaining the debate around public historic places and monuments and what they represent. These conversations are a reminder of the crucial role that public history professionals play in engaging public audiences on subjects of race and slavery. This "difficult history" has often remained un- or underexplored in our public discourse, hidden from view by the tourism industry, or even by public history professionals themselves, as they created historic sites, museums, and public squares based on white-centric interpretations of history and heritage. Challenging History, through a collection of essays by a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, examines how difficult histories, specifically those of slavery and race in the United States, are being interpreted and inserted at public history sites and in public history work. Several essays explore the successes and challenges of recent projects, while others discuss gaps that public historians can fill at sites where Black history took place but is absent in the interpretation. Through case studies, the contributors reveal the entrenched false narratives that public history workers are countering in established public history spaces and the work they are conducting to reorient our collective understanding of the past. History practitioners help the public better understand the world. Their choices help to shape ideas about heritage and historical remembrances and can reform, even transform, worldviews through more inclusive and ethically narrated histories. Challenging History invites public historians to consider the ethical implications of the narratives they choose to share and makes the case that an inclusive, honest, and complete portrayal of the past has the potential to reshape collective memory and ideas about the meaning of American history and citizenship.

The Purpose of the Past

The Purpose of the Past
Author: Gordon S. Wood
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2008-03-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1440637911

An erudite scholar and an elegant writer, Gordon S. Wood has won both numerous awards and a broad readership since the 1969 publication of his widely acclaimed The Creation of the American Republic. With The Purpose of the Past, Wood has essentially created a history of American history, assessing the current state of history vis-à-vis the work of some of its most important scholars-doling out praise and scorn with equal measure. In this wise, passionate defense of history's ongoing necessity, Wood argues that we cannot make intelligent decisions about the future without understanding our past. Wood offers a master's insight into what history-at its best-can be and reflects on its evolving and essential role in our culture.

His Excellency

His Excellency
Author: Joseph J. Ellis
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2005-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1400032539

National Bestseller To this landmark biography of our first president, Joseph J. Ellis brings the exacting scholarship, shrewd analysis, and lyric prose that have made him one of the premier historians of the Revolutionary era. Training his lens on a figure who sometimes seems as remote as his effigy on Mount Rushmore, Ellis assesses George Washington as a military and political leader and a man whose “statue-like solidity” concealed volcanic energies and emotions. Here is the impetuous young officer whose miraculous survival in combat half-convinced him that he could not be killed. Here is the free-spending landowner whose debts to English merchants instilled him with a prickly resentment of imperial power. We see the general who lost more battles than he won and the reluctant president who tried to float above the partisan feuding of his cabinet. His Excellency is a magnificent work, indispensable to an understanding not only of its subject but also of the nation he brought into being.

Southern Waters

Southern Waters
Author: Craig E. Colten
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2014-10-13
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0807156523

Water has dominated images of the South throughout history, from Hernando de Soto's 1541 crossing of the Mississippi to tragic scenes of flooding throughout the Gulf South after Hurricane Katrina. But these images tell only half the story: as urban, industrial, and population growth create unprecedented demands on water in the South, the problems of pollution and water shortages grow ever more urgent. In Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance, Craig E. Colten addresses how the South -- in an environment fraught with uncertainty -- can navigate the twin risks of too much water and not enough. From the arrival of the first European settlers, the South's inhabitants have pursued a course of maximum exploitation and control of the area's plentiful waters, investing widely in wetland drainage and massive flood-control projects. Disputes over southern waterways go back nearly as far: obstruction of fish migration by mill dams prompted new policies to protect aquatic life as early as the colonial era. Colten argues that such conflicts, which have heightened dramatically since the explosive urbanization of the mid-twentieth century, will only become more frequent and intense, making the shift toward sustainable use a national imperative. In tracing the evolving uses and abuses of southern waters, Colten offers crucial insights into the complex historical geography of water throughout the region. A masterful analysis of the ways in which past generations harnessed and consumed water, Southern Waters also stands as a guide to adapting our water usage to cope with the looming shortage of this once-abundant resource.

The Baylors of Newmarket

The Baylors of Newmarket
Author: Thomas Katheder
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2009
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1440129908

Scholars and arm-chair historians of eighteenth-century America will take great pleasure in reading this exceptionally well-researched slice of colonial history. In The Baylors of Newmarket, author Thomas Katheder has meticulously researched one of the wealthiest and most socially prominent yet least known families in colonial Virginia. Drawing on mostly unpublished sources, including British and French archives and Virginia court documents, The Baylors of Newmarket is the fascinating and tragic story of Col. John Baylor III and his son John IV, including Col. Baylor's relentless pursuit of equine perfection and his son's delusional quest for the perfect Virginia mansion. The Baylors of Newmarket places the family in the larger context of a pre-Revolutionary Anglo-Virginian elite that sought to emulate the British gentry in culture, education, books and reading, dress, furnishings, and behavior. After the Revolution, the Baylors struggled to maintain what was becoming an increasingly outmoded lifestyle. This extensively referenced history also describes in rich detail the library begun by Col. Baylor III and expanded by his son John IV within the context of a strong book culture among the pre-Revolutionary Virginia gentry that has been largely underappreciated by scholars.

Separating Fools from Their Money

Separating Fools from Their Money
Author: Scott B. MacDonald
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2015
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 9780765803566

What do Michael Milken and Martha Stewart have in common? (Answer: Both became public scapegoats for an outrageous era of greed and excess.) What was the most outrageous party thrown by a financial baron of the twentieth century? (Answer: Tough call, but either Michael Milken's Predators Ball in 1985, or Dennis Kozlowski's Sardinian birthday bash in 2001, with its vodka-spouting sculpture.) Which U.S. war hero president became party to, and victim of, an unabashed con man known as the Napoleon of Wall Street? (Answer: Ulysses S. Grant, but it's a long story.) These questions and more are discussed in Scott MacDonald and Jane Hughes' Separating Fools from Their Money. The authors trace the history of financial scandals from the early days of the young republic through the Enron/WorldCom debacle of modern times. A host of colorful characters inhabit the pages of this history, revealing human nature in all of its dubious shades of gray. At the same time, the book exposes themes common to all financial scandals, which remain astonishingly unchanged over more than two centuries--greed, hubris, media connections, self-interested politicians, and booms-gone-bust, to name a few. Informative and entertaining, Separating Fools should engage the interest of investors and casual business readers, as well as economists interested in supplemental reading for their students.

Shadow and Shelter

Shadow and Shelter
Author: Anthony Wilson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2009-09-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1604730692

To early European colonists the swamp was a place linked with sin and impurity; to the plantation elite, it was a practical obstacle to agricultural development. For the many excluded from the white southern aristocracy—African Americans, Native Americans, Acadians, and poor, rural whites—the swamp meant something very different, providing shelter and sustenance and offering separation and protection from the dominant plantation culture. Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture explores the interplay of contradictory but equally prevailing metaphors: first, the swamp as the underside of the myth of pastoral Eden that defined the antebellum South; and second, the swamp as the last pure vestige of undominated southern ecoculture. As the South gives in to strip malls and suburban sprawl, its wooded wetlands have come to embody the last part of the region that will always be beyond cultural domination. Examining the southern swamp from a perspective informed by ecocriticism, literary studies, and ecological history, Shadow and Shelter considers the many representations of the swamp and its evolving role in an increasingly multicultural South.

Robert Morris

Robert Morris
Author: Robert M Morris
Publisher: TrineDay
Total Pages: 552
Release: 2022-05-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1634243889

"a cogent, complex look at the American Revolution" – Kirkus Reviews Morris in one year put up more money for the war than all the states combined. The spirit of risk and economic freedom that he championed – laissez-faire capitalism, a radical idea – helped us win the war (and gave rise to our modern system). He coordinated the French Fleet and Washington's arrival at Yorktown. He got rid of religious test laws, and signed all three founding documents. His enemies won the election of 1800 and wrote him out of the story. Only Washington was more indispensable.