Top Highlights

• Inauspicious Beginnings Englishmen came neither to escape religious persecution nor to found a New Jerusalem. Not to Virginia, at least. No, the corporate-backed expedition — by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock venture — sought treasure (think gold), to find a northwest passage to India, and to balance the rival Catholic Spaniards. But first and...
• Jamestown was initially about profit, not settlement. Corporate dividends, not community. This was the private sector, not a permanent national venture. In that sense matters in early Virginia were not unlike modern American economics. Saved by Tobacco, the First Drug Economy They never did find much gold or, for that matter, a northwest passage. T...
• The thing is, after some bloody, early wars with the Powhatan, most gentlemen preferred a stable, secure status quo. Not another war. That’d be bad for business. However, falling tobacco prices, increased competition from nearby colonies, and the relentless search by the former indentured class for more land brought frontier Virginians into conflic...
• Bacon’s Rebellion was one of the foundational — and most misunderstood — events in American history. Here, a populist army savagely assaulted hated Native Americans and aristocrats alike. A mix of black and white former indentured servants demonstrated the fragility of Virginian society. The planter class was terrified. To avoid — at all costs — a ...
• Should this country wish to move forward, be its best self, and fulfill the dream of its finest rhetoric, then the citizenry must dispense with reassuring myths and grapple with inconvenient truths. What, then, do Jamestown and early Virginia have to tell us in the twenty-first century? Perhaps this: American slavery arose alongside and intertwined...