The Planting of New Virginia

by Hofstra, Warren R.

• ISBN13: 9780801882715
• ISBN10: 0801882710
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-08-18
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

In the eighteenth century, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley became a key corridor for America's westward expansion through the Cumberland Gap. Known as "New Virginia," the region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains set off the world of the farmer from that of the planter, grain and livestock production from tobacco culture, and a free labor society from a slave labor society. In The Planting of New Virginia Warren Hofstra offers the first comprehensive geographical history of one of North America's most significant frontier areas. By examining the early landscape history of the Shenandoah Valley in its regional and global context, Hofstra sheds new light on social, economic, political, and intellectual developments that affected both the region and the entire North American Atlantic world. Paying special attention to the Shenandoah Valley's backcountry frontier culture, Hofstra shows how that culture played a unique role in the territorial struggle between European empires and Native American nations. He weaves together the broad cultural and geographic threads that underlie the story of the valley's place in the early European settlement of eastern North America. He also reveals the distinctive ways in which settlers shaped the valley's geography during the eighteenth century, a pattern that evolved from "discrete open-country neighborhoods" into a complex "town and country settlement" that would come to characterize -- and in many ways epitomize -- middle America. An important addition to scholarship of the geography and history of colonial and early America, The Planting of New Virginia, rethinks American history and the evolution of the American landscape in the colonial era.

Author Biography

Warren R. Hofstra is the Stewart Bell Professor of History at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction | The Evolution of New Virginia	1	(16)
Empire and Encounter | A Prologue	17	(33)
Peopling an Empire	50	(44)
Settling the Shenandoah	94	(49)
Bounding the Land	143	(37)
Centering the County	180	(56)
From Strategic Place to Central Place	236	(36)
Town and Country	272	(54)
The Future of New Virginia | An Epilogue	326	(13)
Notes	339	(58)
Index	397