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Suggested Readings on Virginia History

Recommended reading on Virginia history from the precontact era to the twentieth century

Precontact and Colonial Era

Billings, Warren M. Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.

———. A Little Parliament : the Virginia General Assembly in the Seventeenth Century. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2004.

Billings, Warren M., Thad Tate, and John E. Selby. Colonial Virginia: A History. White Plains, NY: KTO Press, 1986.

Bond, Edward L. Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000.

Breen, T. H. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Breen, T. H., and Stephen Innes. “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 16401676. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Evans, Emory G. A. “Topping People”: The Rise and Decline of Virginia’s Old Political Elite, 16801790. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009.

Fisher, David Hackett, and James C. Kelly. Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Gleach, Frederic W. Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Hofstra, Warren R. The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Horn, James P. P. Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.

Kelso, William M. Jamestown: The Truth Revealed. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017.

Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. The Jamestown Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.

Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1998.

Nelson, John K. A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 16901776. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Pagan, John Ruston. Anne Orthwood’s Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Parent, Anthony S. Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 16601740. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Rice, James D. Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Shefveland, Kristalyn Marie. Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 16461722. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Sobel, Mechal. The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

Walsh, Lorena Seebach. From Calabar to Carter’s Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

Williamson, Margaret Holmes. Powhatan Lords of Life and Death: Command and Consent in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.