The dissolution of the ill-starred Virginia Company in 1624 left Virginia -- now England's first royal colony -- without a formal raison d'etre. Most historians have suggested that the nascent local societies were anarchic, under the thrall of violent and unscrupulous men. James Perry asserts the opposite: The Formation of a Society on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1615-1655 depicts emergent social cohesion. In a model of network analysis, Perry mines county court records to trace landholders through four decades -- their land, families, neighborhoods, local and offshore economic relations, and institutions. A wealth of statistics documents their development from rudimentary beginnings to a more highly articulated society capable of resolving conflict and working toward communal good. Perry's methodology will serve as a model for analyzing other new settlements, particularly those lacking the close-knit religious bonds and contractual foundations of New England towns. His conclusions will reshape notions of the development of early Chesapeake society. Originally published in 1990. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

This collection of essays on seventeenth-century Virginia, the first such collection on the Chesapeake in nearly twenty-five years, highlights emerging directions in scholarship and helps set a new agenda for research in the next decade and beyond. The contributors represent some of the best of a younger generation of scholars who are building on, but also criticizing and moving beyond, the work of the so-called Chesapeake School of social history that dominated the historiography of the region in the 1970s and 1980s. Employing a variety of methodologies, analytical strategies, and types of evidence, these essays explore a wide range of topics and offer a fresh look at the early religious, political, economic, social, and intellectual life of the colony. Contributors Douglas Bradburn, Binghamton University, State University of New York * John C. Coombs, Hampden-Sydney College * Victor Enthoven, Netherlands Defense Academy * Alexander B. Haskell, University of California Riverside * Wim Klooster, Clark University * Philip Levy, University of South Florida * Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University * William A. Pettigrew, University of Kent * Edward DuBois Ragan, Valentine Richmond History Center * Terri L. Snyder, California State University, Fullerton * Camilla Townsend, Rutgers University * Lorena S. Walsh, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Proof that the renaissance in colonial Chesapeake studies is flourishing, this collection is the first to integrate the immigrant experience of the seventeenth century with the native-born society that characterized the Chesapeake by the eighteenth century. Younger historians and senior scholars here focus on the everyday lives of ordinary people: why they came to the Chesapeake; how they adapted to their new world; who prospered and why; how property was accumulated and by whom. At the same time, the essays encompass broader issues of early American history, including the transatlantic dimension of colonization, the establishment of communities, both religious and secular, the significance of regionalism, the causes and effects of social and economic diversification, and the participation of Indians and blacks in the formation of societies. Colonial Chesapeake Society consolidates current advances in social history and provokes new questions.

Since its original publication in 1975, The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century has become an important teaching tool and research volume. Warren Billings brings together more than 200 period documents, organized topically, with each chapter introduced by an interpretive essay. Topics include the settlement of Jamestown, the evolution of government and the structure of society, forced labor, the economy, Indian-Anglo relations, and Bacon's Rebellion. This revised, expanded, and updated edition adds approximately 30 additional documents, extending the chronological reach to 1700. Freshly rethought chapter introductions and suggested readings incorporate the vast scholarship of the past 30 years. New illustrations of seventeenth-century artifacts and buildings enrich the texts with recent archaeological findings. With these enhancements, and a full index, students, scholars, and those interested in early Virginia will find these documents even more enlightening.

The book is a new study that examines the contrasting extension of the Anglican Church to England's first two colonies, Ireland and Virginia in the 17th and 18th centuries. It discusses the national origins and educational experience of the ministers, the financial support of the state, and the experience and consequences of the institutions.

Brothers Among Nations represents an effort to show how central Natives were to the European colonial project by demonstrating that the formation of alliances was the only way for the nascent colonies to succeed.

History of food in the United States.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize A compelling, fresh account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America, their involvements with each other, and their struggles with the indigenous peoples of the eastern seaboard. The immigrants were a mixed multitude. They came from England, the Netherlands, the German and Italian states, France, Africa, Sweden, and Finland, and they moved to the western hemisphere for different reasons, from different social backgrounds and cultures. They represented a spectrum of religious attachments. In the early years, their stories are not mainly of triumph but of confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize situations and recapture lost worlds. It was a thoroughly brutal encounter—not only between the Europeans and native peoples and between Europeans and Africans, but among Europeans themselves, as they sought to control and prosper in the new configurations of life that were emerging around them.

Combining mastery of existing scholarship with a fresh approach to new material, Born in the Country continues to define the field of American rural history.

Explores the particular beliefs of Maryland's Catholic laborers, who were at odds with the traditional English Catholic gentry, in opposition to their crown, parliament, clergy and papacy, and sympathetic to the Protestant Antinomians seeking to challenge the established order of Maryland's church and state. The economic, intellectual, legal and social history of the Maryland Catholics during the English Civil War is compared to related developments in Europe, Latin America, and Africa.