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"Colonial Virginia"
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Subfloor pits and the archaeology of slavery in colonial Virginia
Enslaved Africans and their descendants comprised a significant portion of colonial Virginia populations, with most living on rural slave quarters adjacent to the agricultural fields in which they labored. Archaeological excavations into these home sites have provided unique windows into the daily lifeways and culture of these early inhabitants. A common characteristic of Virginia slave quarters is the presence of subfloor pits beneath the houses. The most common explanations of the functions of these pits are as storage places for personal belongings or root vegetables, and some contextual and ethnohistoric data suggest they may have served as West Africa-style shrines. Through excavations of 103 subfloor pits dating from the 17th through mid-19th centuries, Samford reveals a wealth of data including shape, location, surface area, and depth, as well as contents and patterns of related feature placement. Archaeology reveals the material circumstances of slaves’ lives, which in turn opens the door to illuminating other aspects of life: spirituality, symbolic meanings assigned to material goods, social life, individual and group agency, and acts of resistance and accommodation. Analysis of the artifact assemblages allows the development of hypotheses about how West African, possibly Igbo, cultural traditions were maintained and transformed in the Virginia Chesapeake.
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Republic of Indians
A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law A sweeping history of the Native Southerners who challenged European empires from the inside, Republic of Indians tells the story of Indigenous leaders who wrote their principles into Spanish and English law.While in the Spanish Empire, Natives were a recognized part of \"la república de indios, \" the \"republic of Indians, \" other Natives across the early American South understood themselves to be joined with European colonists in larger polities, each jealously guarding their own bodies of liberties under royal sanction. Thus, rather than simply rejecting European pretensions to rule them as subjects and vassals, Native Southerners as diverse as the Apalachees, Pamunkeys, Powhatans, and Timucuas redefined their status to become political players in legislative assemblies and the courts of distant monarchs. They pushed for incorporation in larger political systems in which they had a say and were themselves instrumental in creating.Adapting pre-invasion practices to the technology of writing and the challenges of colonialism, Indigenous petitioners sought exemptions from labor and protection for \"the lands that God gave to them, \" as well as the right to install preferred leaders, avoid enslavement, ally with the Crown against colonists, ease harsh colonial laws, and even amend the terms of treaties and compacts. Bradley J. Dixon shows how their petitions also stand as enduring contributions to American political thought and how it was these \"vassals\" and \"subjects\" who gave meaning to the modern idea of tribal sovereignty. In the South, the Spanish and English empires came to resemble one another precisely because they were both dependent to a remarkable degree on maintaining Indigenous political consent and were founded in large part on Indigenous conceptions of law.
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New beginnings : Jamestown and the Virginia Colony 1607-1699
A story of the hardships and achievements of the settlers of Jamestown.
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The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624
In response to the global turn in scholarship on colonial and early modern history, the eighteen essays in this volume provide a fresh and much-needed perspective on the wider context of the encounter between the inhabitants of precolonial Virginia and the English. This collection offers an interdisciplinary consideration of developments in Native America, Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and the Chesapeake, highlighting the mosaic of regions and influences that formed the context and impetus for the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The volume reflects an understanding of Jamestown not as the birthplace of democracy in America but as the creation of a European outpost in a neighborhood that included Africans, Native Americans, and other Europeans. With contributions from both prominent and rising scholars, this volume offers far-ranging and compelling studies of peoples, texts, places, and conditions that influenced the making of New World societies. As Jamestown marks its four-hundredth anniversary, this collection provides provocative material for teaching and launching new research. Contributors: Philip P. Boucher, University of Alabama, Huntsville Peter Cook, Nipissing University J. H. Elliott, University of Oxford Andrew Fitzmaurice, University of Sydney Joseph Hall, Bates College Linda Heywood, Boston University James Horn, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation E. Ann McDougall, University of Alberta Peter C. Mancall, University of Southern California Philip D. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University David Northrup, Boston College Marcy Norton, The George Washington University James D. Rice, State University of New York, Plattsburgh Daniel K. Richter, University of Pennsylvania David Harris Sacks, Reed College Benjamin Schmidt, University of Washington Stuart B. Schwartz, Yale University David S. Shields, University of South Carolina Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, McGill University James H. Sweet, University of Wisconsin, Madison John Thornton, Boston University
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The Jamestown brides : the story of England's \Maids for Virginia\
\"In 1621, nearly fifteen years after the establishment of the Jamestown colony, the Virginia Company funded another voyage of colonists to the New World. This time, however, their ships carried fifty-six young women. Their ages ranged from sixteen to twenty-eight, they were of good character and proven skills, and each had a bride price of 150lbs of tobacco set by the Company. Though the women had all agreed to journey to Jamestown of their own free will, they were also unquestionably there to be sold into marriage, thereby generating a profit for investors and increasing the colony's long-term viability. These were the aims of the Virginia Company at least; the aims of the women themselves are less clear. Without letters or journals (young women from middling classes had not generally been taught to write), Jennifer Potter's research has turned to the Virginia Company's merchant lists, which were used as a kind of sales catalog for prospective husbands, as well as censuses, court records, the minutes of Virginia's General Assemblies, letters to England from their male counterparts, and other such accounts of the everyday life of the early colonists. The first part of her book explores the women's lives before their departure, but the true heft of the work lies in the second part, which documents the women's lives in Jamestown. In telling the story of these \"Maids for Virginia,\" Potter at once sheds light on life for women in early modern England and in the New World.\"--Provided by poublsher.
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The English Empire in America, 1602-1658: Beyond Jamestown
This study situates the colonization of Virginia, the centrepiece of early English overseas settlement activity, in the social and political landscape of the early seventeenth century. Roper explores how the early development of the colony was viewed from both sides of the Atlantic, using the documentary record of key figures in the Virginia Company, as well as the colonizers themselves. He paints a vivid picture of a political culture characterized by patronage, the pursuit of personal agendas and fierce grappling for factional advantage, as 'Old World' political behaviour was successfully transplanted to the colony. At the same time however, he shows how local concerns and identity competed with the Stuart monarchy's attempts to centralize state affairs on the other side of the Atlantic. Roper rejects the prevailing view of the early colonisers, the Virginia Company and Crown ministers as bumbling incompetents whose mismanagement nearly caused the failure of the Jamestown project. Rather, he argues, they had a clear sense of purpose for the colony, and successfully adapted and crafted inherited political systems to a very new situation.
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Virginia 1619
Virginia 1619provides an opportunity to reflect on the origins of English colonialism around the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic world. As the essays here demonstrate, Anglo-Americans have been simultaneously experimenting with representative government and struggling with the corrosive legacy of racial thinking for more than four centuries. Virginia, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not the product of thoughtless, greedy, or impatient English colonists. Instead, the emergence of stable English Atlantic colonies reflected the deliberate efforts of an array of actors to establish new societies based on their ideas about commonwealth, commerce, and colonialism. Looking back from 2019, we can understand that what happened on the shores of the Chesapeake four hundred years ago was no accident. Slavery and freedom were born together as migrants and English officials figured out how to make this colony succeed. They did so in the face of rival ventures and while struggling to survive in a dangerous environment. Three hallmarks of English America--self-government, slavery, and native dispossession--took shape as everyone contested the future of empire along the James River in 1619. The contributors are Nicholas Canny, Misha Ewen, Andrew Fitzmaurice, Jack P. Greene, Paul D. Halliday, Alexander B. Haskell, James Horn, Michael J. Jarvis, Peter C. Mancall, Philip D. Morgan, Melissa N. Morris, Paul Musselwhite, James D. Rice, and Lauren Working.
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