NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "James and Deborah Fallows have always moved to where history is being made.... They have an excellent sense of where world-shaping events are taking place at any moment" —The New York Times • The basis for the HBO documentary streaming on HBO Max For five years, James and Deborah Fallows have travelled across America in a single-engine prop airplane. Visiting dozens of towns, the America they saw is acutely conscious of its problems—from economic dislocation to the opioid scourge—but it is also crafting solutions, with a practical-minded determination at dramatic odds with the bitter paralysis of national politics. At times of dysfunction on a national level, reform possibilities have often arisen from the local level. The Fallowses describe America in the middle of one of these creative waves. Their view of the country is as complex and contradictory as America itself, but it also reflects the energy, the generosity and compassion, the dreams, and the determination of many who are in the midst of making things better. Our Towns is the story of their journey—and an account of a country busy remaking itself.

Spent cartridges. The pieces of an original Tabasco Pepper Sauce bottle. Shards of a ceramic pot, stained red. For archaeologists each of the thousands of artifacts uncovered at a site tells a story. For noted Comstock authority Ronald M. James, it is a story resulting from decades of research and excavation at one of the largest National Historic Landmarks in America, the Nevada town that, with the discovery of the Comstock Lode, became a boomtown microcosm of the American West. Drawing on the work of hundreds of volunteers, students, and professional archaeologists, Virginia City: Secrets of a Western Past shows how every detail—from unearthed artifacts to reports of local saloons to plans for the cemetery to surviving nineteenth-century buildings—adds to our view of Virginia City when it was one of the richest places on earth. James recreates this unlikely epitome of frontier industry and cosmopolitan living, the thriving hub of corporate executives, middle-class families, miners, prostitutes, and barkeepers—and more foreign-born residents per capita than anywhere else in the country—in a spot that had begun its life a few years earlier as the mining camp of several lucky guys. An excavation of the history of Virginia City, a window on the heyday of the American frontier, James’s book is also an enlightening look at how archaeology brings the story of the past to life.

This is a highly regarded account of the formation of the 173 present-day and extinct counties of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Commencing with the incorporation in 1617 of the first four parishes of the Virginia Colony, James City, Charles City, Henrico and Elizabeth City, and concluding with the formation of Dickenson County in 1880 from portions of Russell, Wise and Buchanan counties, this marvelously compact book accounts for the beginnings and alterations of each and every county in Virginia, as well as those Virginia counties now found in the states of West Virginia and Kentucky. Mrs. Hiden, whose engaging narrative of Virginia boundary changes commands the reader's attention throughout, describes the historical factors leading to the formation of new counties, such as the spread of population, military and other territorial expansion, and the role of politics and the law; explains how the counties were named (as in the case of Princess Anne, which was named for the second daughter of King James II); and outlines the new boundary lines themselves. For the convenience of the researcher, at the back of the volume are a series of charts showing the progression of county formation, an alphabetical list of Virginia counties keyed to the charts, a subject index, and a map of Colonial Virginia.

While in London in 1705, Robert Beverley wrote and published The History and Present State of Virginia, one of the earliest printed English-language histories about North America by an author born there. Like his brother-in-law William Byrd II, Beverley was a scion of Virginia's planter elite, personally ambitious and at odds with royal governors in the colony. As a native-born American--most famously claiming "I am an Indian--he provided English readers with the first thoroughgoing account of the province's past, natural history, Indians, and current politics and society. In this new edition, Susan Scott Parrish situates Beverley and his History in the context of the metropolitan-provincial political and cultural issues of his day and explores the many contradictions embedded in his narrative. Parrish's introduction and the accompanying annotation, along with a fresh transcription of the 1705 publication and a more comprehensive comparison of emendations in the 1722 edition, will open Beverley's History to new, twenty-first-century readings by students of transatlantic history, colonialism, natural science, literature, and ethnohistory.

Representing over 20 years of research, West Virginia Glass Towns documents 460 hot glass manufacturers in the Mountain State, and spanning about 200 years of historic glass production. From bottles to window glass, art glass to practical tableware, it was all made here. Using hundreds of photographs, fire insurance maps, period archival material, advertisements, catalogs and much more, West Virginia Glass Towns tells the rich legacy of West Virginia glass in images and pictures. Here are the faces of men and women who made the glass, the factories, site maps, and a wide variety of other illustrations. Included are small one-person art glass studios and massive international corporations like Owens-Illinois and Corning. If hot glass was made in West Virginia it is represented here. Arranged alphabetically by city, each town begins with a short introductory overview, followed by a chronological listing of factories, dates and products produced, and then a rich diversity of images. It is a priceless tool for students of history and glass, as well as those desiring to understand the complex tapestry of the states past.

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.

Nevada’s Comstock Mining District has been the focus of legend since it first burst into international prominence in the late 1850s, and its principal settlement, Virginia City, endures in the popular mind as the West’s quintessential mining camp. But the authentic history of the Comstock is far more complex and interesting than its colorful image. Contrary to legend, Virginia City spent only its first few years as a ramshackle mining camp. The mining boom quickly turned it into a thriving urban center, at its peak one of the largest cities west of the Mississippi, replete with most of the amenities of any large city of its time. The lure of the area’s fabulous wealth attracted a remarkably heterogenous population from around the world and offered employment to dozens of trades and thousands of people, both men and women, representing every one of the region’s diverse ethnic groups. Ronald James’s brilliant account of the Comstock’s long and eventful history—the first comprehensive study of the subject in over a century—examines every aspect of the region and employs information gleaned from hundreds of written sources, interviews, archeological research, computer analysis, folklore, gender studies, physical geography, and architectural and art history, as well as over fifty rare photographs, many of them previously unpublished.

Contents: State codes; Municipal & County Codes; Rules of Court; Reports of Cases; Official Court Records in Print; Accounts of Trials; Indexes, Digests, & Encyclopedias; Form Books; Law Treatises Printed Before 1950; Criminal Law Books; 19th-Century Law Journals; 20th-Century Legal Periodicals; Legal Education; Academic Law Libraries; William & Mary Law Library; Public Law Librarians; The Norfolk Law Library; Private Law Libraries Before 1776; Private Law Libraries After 1776; Public Printers; J.W. Randolph; The Michie Company; General Virginia Bibliography; Index of Authors & Editors; & Subject Index.