Alexander and Janet Schaw, Scottish siblings, began a journey in 1774 that would take them from Edinburgh to the Caribbean Islands and then to America. Part of the early wave of Scottish colonization, the pair visited family and friends who had already established themselves in the colonies. ""Journal of a Lady of Quality"" is Janet Schaw's account of this voyage through letters to a friend in Scotland. The letters describe the sights, scenery, and social life she encountered, but they also reveal the political atmosphere of an America on the verge of revolution. Stephen Carl Arch provides a new introduction for this Bison Books edition.

This authoritative catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's renowned collection of pre-1945 American paintings will greatly enhance scholarly and public understanding of one of the finest and most important collections of historic American art in the world. Composed of more than 600 objects dating from 1740 to 1945.

The book rings with the names of early inhabitants and prominent citizens. For the genealogist there is the important and wholly fortuitous list of tithables of Pittsylvania County for the year 1767, which enumerates the names of nearly 1,000 landowners and property holders, amounting in sum to a rough census of the county in its infancy. Additional lists include the names, some with inclusive dates of service, of sheriffs, justices of the peace, members of the House of Delegates, 1776-1928, members of the Senate of Virginia, 1776-1928, clerks of the court, and judges.

Washington was rarely isolated from the world during his eventful life. His diary for 1751-52 relates a voyage to Barbados when he was nineteen. The next two accounts concern the early phases of the French and Indian War, in which Washington commanded a Virginia regiment. By the 1760s when Washington's diaries resume, he considered himself retired from public life, but George III was on the British throne and in the American colonies the process of unrest was beginning that would ultimately place Washington in command of a revolutionary army. Even as he traveled to Philadelphia in 1787 to chair the Constitutional Convention, however, and later as president, Washington's first love remained his plantation, Mount Vernon. In his diary, he religiously recorded the changing methods of farming he employed there and the pleasures of riding and hunting. Rich in material from this private sphere, The Diaries of George Washington offer historians and anyone interested in Washington a closer view of the first president in this bicentennial year of his death.