William Byrd II (1674-1744) was an important figure in the history of colonial Virginia: a founder of Richmond, an active participant in Virginia politics, and the proprietor of one of the colony's greatest plantations. But Byrd is best known today for his diaries. Considered essential documents of private life in colonial America, they offer readers an unparalleled glimpse into the world of a Virginia gentleman. This book joins Byrd's Diary, Secret Diary, and other writings in securing his reputation as one of the most interesting men in colonial America. Edited and presented here for the first time, Byrd's commonplace book is a collection of moral wit and wisdom gleaned from reading and conversation. The nearly six hundred entries range in tone from hope to despair, trust to dissimulation, and reflect on issues as varied as science, religion, women, Alexander the Great, and the perils of love. A ten-part introduction presents an overview of Byrd's life and addresses such topics as his education and habits of reading and his endeavors to understand himself sexually, temperamentally, and religiously, as well as the history and cultural function of commonplacing. Extensive annotations discuss the sources, background, and significance of the entries.

Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover

William Byrd II was a prominent eighteenth-century Virginian who at the time of his death owned over 180,000 acres and employed laborers and enslaved Africans to work his land. His letters, diaries, and surveying documents have become key texts in the study of American history, and he is one of the most quoted and discussed figures of his era. Byrd himself was perhaps the early colonial epitome of a patriarch, and typically, when historians examine Byrd and the prominence of patriarchal thought in colonial Virginia, they examine his relationships with his immediate family. In this book, however, Dennis Todd examines the patriarchal relations between Byrd and the workers on his plantations—his apprentices, his wageworkers, his overseers, his white servants, and especially his slaves. In doing so, this book illuminates a neglected stage in the formation of slavery in Virginia. Todd argues that patriarchal principles, which are often assumed to have justified slavery and to have offered a template for slave management, in fact did neither. Byrd was not the only Virginian to wrestle with the contradictions between patriarchal values and the realities of slavery, but few were as articulate. In examining Byrd through the twin lens of slavery and patriarchy, Patriarchy in Peril makes an important contribution to our understanding of the man and his place in Virginia society as well as the contentious formation of early America.

This History explores the development of literary culture in Virginia from the founding of Jamestown to the twenty-first century.

Explores the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean. For them, becoming 'enlightened' meant diversion, status seeking, satisfying curiosity about the tropical environment, and making sense of the brutal societies and the enslaved Africans.

In The Idea of Europe and the Origins of the American Revolution, Dan Robinson presents a new history of politics in colonial America and the imperial crisis, tracing how ideas of Europe and Europeanness shaped British-American political culture. Reconstructing colonial debates about the European states system, European civilisation, and Britain's position within both, Robinson shows how these concerns informed colonial attitudes towards American identity and America's place inside - and, ultimately, outside - the emerging British Empire. Taking in more than two centuries of Atlantic history, he explores the way in which colonists inherited and adapted Anglo-British traditions of thinking about international politics, how they navigated imperial politics during the European wars of 1740-1763, and how the burgeoning patriot movement negotiated the dual crisis of Europe and Empire in the between 1763 and 1775. In the process, Robinson sheds new light on the development of public politics in colonial America, the Anglicisation/Americanisation debate, the political economy of empire, early American art and poetry, eighteenth-century geopolitical thinking, and the relationship between international affairs, nationalism, and revolution. What emerges from this story is an American Revolution that seems both decidedly arcane and strikingly relevant to the political challenges of the twenty-first century.

A comprehensive, contextual presentation of all aspects—social, political, and economic—of slavery in the United States, from the first colonization through Reconstruction. For 250 years, slavery was part of the fabric of American life. The institution had an enormous economic impact and was central to the wealth of the agrarian South. It had as great an impact on American culture, cementing racism and other attitudes that echo into the present. This encyclopedia is an ambitious examination of all the issues surrounding slavery: the origins, the justifications, the controversies, and the human drama. These volumes represent the work of 75 distinguished scholars from around the world. Ten thematic essays present a thorough examination of slavery and slave culture, including a rare treatment of slavery from the slave's point of view. Three hundred A–Z entries provide instant access to specific people, issues, and events. Today, slavery's immorality seems obvious. This encyclopedia provides the student or general reader with an in-depth explanation of how the practice evolved and was normalized, then anathematized and abolished.

At a time when the environment is of growing concern to students and general readers, nature writing is especially meaningful. This book profiles the literary careers of 52 early American nature writers, such as John James Audubon, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Caroline Stansbury Kirkland, Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, and Mabel Osgood Wright. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and discusses the writer's life and works. Entries close with primary and secondary bibliographies, and the encyclopedia ends with suggestions for further reading. Global warming, pollution, and other issues have made the environment a topic of constant discussion these days. Many environmental concerns were treated by early American nature writers, who recognized the beauty of the natural world in an age of commercial expansion. Some of the most famous writers of the 18th and 19th centuries wrote about nature, and their works are stylistic masterpieces. At a time when students are being encouraged to read and write about nonfiction, these masterworks of early American nature writing are all the more important. This book gives students and general readers a welcome introduction to early American nature writers.

This book explores the influence of classical texts upon early European settlers and inhabitants of the Tidewater region of Virginia, addressing how Greek and Roman literature and culture shaped and sometimes challenged prevailing assumptions about personhood, liberty, town planning, and representative government in Virginia during the period of its expansion from the fort at Jamestown to Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia. Ben Haller introduces the reader to the Ovid translation which George Sandys penned during his time in Virginia as Treasurer; William Strachey’s account of the wreck of the Sea Venture, likely one inspiration for William Shakespeare’s The Tempest; William Byrd II’s writings, including his secret diaries which record the intimate details of the life of an Indian Trader and plantation owner in the early eighteenth century; and Jefferson’s expansive Enlightenment Era appetite for knowledge classical and modern. Haller’s analysis of these texts is carefully anchored in a discussion of the cultural historical context of the English settlement of Virginia, the excavations of Pompeii, the eighteenth-century mania for Palladian architecture, the construction of the campus of the University of Virginia, and new Enlightenment ideals of personal liberty and human rights which came to the fore during Jefferson’s lifetime, and which he helped to enshrine in modern American political thought.

Susan Clair Imbarrato, Carol Berkin, Brett Barney, Lisa Paddock, Matthew J. Bruccoli, George Parker Anderson, Judith S.