Germanna was located in Orange County, Virginia, and was established in 1714-1717. It ceased to exist by 1732 since most of the early settlers had moved on to Germantown in Fauquier County or to other settlements in Madison or Culpeper counties, Virginia.

Germanna was a German settlement in the Colony of Virginia, settled in two waves, first in 1714 and then in 1717. Virginia Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood encouraged the immigration by advertising in Germany for miners to move to Virginia and establish a mining industry in the colony.

Hendricks writes on how towns in backcountry Virginia came about from the designs and ambitions of entrepreneurial individuals. They did not just spring up randomly in some pleasing meadow or on some riverbank happened upon by a frontiersman, for example, or a group which had struck out into the wilderness. "The people who put these plans [for towns] into action were motivated by a variety of economic, social, or philanthropic factors and sometimes purely by circumstance and opportunity." These entrepreneurial-like individuals were not a part of any organized movement. But their activities in toto played a large part in opening up the western parts of Virginia and setting a pattern for westward expansion. Among the towns Hendricks studies in larger topological areas such as the Piedmont and the Great Valley (Shenandoah) are Winchester, Marysville, Leesburg, Woodstock, Charlottesville, and Brent Town. Early maps of many of the towns especially demonstrate the ideas and purposes of their founders. Along with the maps, the authors specifics on the conception, establishment, and early period of the many towns makes each oe stand out distinctively. The enterprises and goals of the town were as varied as the individuals who conceived them.

Scholars of British America generally conclude that the early eighteenth-century Anglo-American empire was commercial in economics, liberal in politics, and parochial in policy, somnambulant in an era of “salutary neglect,” but Stephen Saunders Webb here demonstrates that the American provinces, under the spur of war, became capitalist, coercive, and aggressive, owing to the vigorous leadership of career army officers, trained and nominated to American government by the captain general of the allied armies, the first duke of Marlborough, and that his influence, and that of his legates, prevailed through the entire century in America. Webb’s work follows the duke, whom an eloquent enemy described as “the greatest statesman and the greatest general that this country or any other country has produced,” his staff and soldiers, through the ten campaigns, which, by defanging France, made the union with Scotland possible and made “Great Britain” preeminent in the Atlantic world. Then Webb demonstrates that the duke’s legates transformed American colonies into provinces of empire. Marlborough’s America, fifty years in the making, is the fourth volume of The Governors-General.