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The article focuses on the prevalence of dueling culture in Edgar Allan Poe's Richmond, exploring how insults often led to deadly feuds, and how the practice persisted despite being illegal. Topics include the historical context of dueling in the South, its influence on Poe's works, and instances of duels involving prominent figures in Richmond, providing insights into the societal norms and conflicts of the time.

Copyright of Canadian Review of American Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 1860, with the Civil War looming, David and Elizabeth Frazier (a free Black couple), petitioned for a legal exemption to an 1806 statute demanding that any newly-freed African Americans emigrate from the Commonwealth within a year of their emancipation. Their petition capped a decade-long struggle to gain their freedom and keep their family intact, during which the Fraziers campaigned on fronts spanning from the courtroom to the slave market. Through a microhistory of the Fraziers' battle for the right to remain in the Commonwealth, this essay explores the ways in which a slave state used emigration policies to safeguard the institution of slavery. It also reveals the ferocity with which Black Virginians defended their families and communities, and, by examining the Fraziers' twin deployment of the law and of relationships built through a decade of work amid the horrors of the domestic slave trade, reveals how free people of color seized the scarce options available to them. Between the law of white supremacy and the maw of slave capitalism, the Fraziers carved out a modicum of liberty for themselves and their children, escaping forced migration in their bondage and forced emigration in their freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article employs previously underutilized tax records to quantify the level of economic distress in Virginia in the 1780s. Historians have offered sharply contrasting interpretations. While some scholars emphasize postwar prosperity, others suggest an economic crisis that may have rivaled the Great Depression. Tax records offer an opportunity to evaluate and reconcile these conflicting narratives. By counting the number of individuals who could not pay their taxes and dividing by the taxable population found in the assessment lists, the insolvency rate produces an indicator comparable to a modern bankruptcy rate. Regional insolvency patterns reveal that historians have tended to generalize from localized phenomena that are unrepresentative of the larger economy. Tax records demonstrate that the critical period was not imagined. Local commodity prices were most important in shaping economic outcomes. Insolvency trends support and contextualize existing interpretations of tax resistance and voting patterns during the ratification debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the significance of the seventeenth-century Ferrar family’s involvement in Atlantic colonialism, and their interest in compiling natural histories of the various flora and fauna in the Virginia colony, particularly the silkworm. I argue that the Ferrars’ involvement in colonial enterprises, in particular the Virginia Company, was underpinned by a theology which centred upon the idea of recovering man’s original dominion over the earth, bestowed by God upon Adam in Eden, but lost in the Fall. The Ferrars’ commitment to this theology of repairing the post-lapsarian world enables us to integrate our understanding of the family’s colonial interests with their religiosity. There was no disjunction between the worldliness of the family’s commercial and colonial dealings with the Virginia Company, and the ascetic period of retreat at Little Gidding. This article contributes to a broader scholarly effort to understand the development of seventeenth-century Anglicanism in a colonial context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The free press clause in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is considered a unique and important part of our American democracy. While the origins of this right are a key to current legal interpretations, there is much misunderstanding about its genesis. This research uses eighteenth-century personal correspondence, other archival evidence, and published articles to demonstrate new connections between the Lee family of Virginia and the constitutional right to a free press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Groups within southern society seized on John Jasper’s sermon arguing that the sun moved around the earth in order to reinforce ideas of African American inferiority. Jasper, however, took advantage of these efforts at exploitation. By embodying the stereotype whites sought to promote, Jasper became very popular with white visitors, and tourists to Richmond frequently requested renditions of the sermon. Through preaching his sun sermon on 253 occasions, Jasper was not only able to secure the financial and social independence of his church, but also provided inspiration to African Americans through highlighting that southern white supremacy could be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses evidence from the English High Court of Admiralty to examine the problem of mutiny and indiscipline among seafarers in the transatlantic trades during the 1680s and 1690s. It focuses on a venture of 1688, which is of particular interest not only for the light it sheds on maritime conditions, but also because it involved Daniel Defoe, a young and ambitious trader who was trying to establish a commercial opening in Chesapeake Bay. The article contextualizes this previously unknown venture, relating it to the development of the tobacco trade and its dependence on an expanding market and widening patterns of consumption. The failure of the voyage, in association with other business problems, had serious consequences for Defoe, leading to bankruptcy in 1692 and his withdrawal from direct involvement in overseas trade. Against a broader background of other voyages, the legal testimony heard by the court draws attention to the wider problem of mutinous conduct at sea. These cases were provoked by a range of grievances including pay, labour conditions and discipline. Repeatedly they raise questions about the conduct of masters at sea, including their rights and responsibilities. At the same time, the article argues that the upsurge in mutiny and indiscipline at sea, while revealing the inexorable tension between pay and productivity, also exposed deeper issues regarding seafaring custom and contract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Northern Democrats desired to restore the American Union to the status quo antebellum, while Republicans sought to transform the United States, and especially the slave-owning southern states, into a free labour, industrialized nation. So runs the traditional tale. This article argues that a new twist on the story of sectional politics may be found if one adds the religious dimension of millenarian belief to the well-studied ideological flashpoints between Democratic and Republican combatants as they clashed in Virginia in the year leading up to the issuance of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews history websites including "Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative," created by Vincent Brown, available at http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html, "Two Plantations: Enslaved Families in Virginia and Jamaica." available at: http://www.twoplantations.com/, and "Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915-1930" available at digitalharlem.org.

John Wilkes was a radical British politician who was extremely popular with many American revolutionaries and provided a powerful example of why liberty of the press was so critical. Wilkes was arrested, thrown out of Parliament, put into prison, and accused of treason and seditious libel. His legal travails, his publications, and his every movement were covered with great interest by the colonial newspapers. While a blasphemous and pornographic publication eventually tarnished his reputation, he was nonetheless an important force behind many American constitutional protections. This article explores a connection not previously developed—how John Wilkes was a key inspiration for the first-ever constitutional protection for a free press. The conclusion here is that Wilkes should be remembered for his crucial influence upon the American ideal of press freedom; his battle against seditious libel charges was a notable precedent for attitudes against control of the media on this side of the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Post-Medieval Archaeology is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Two events, both labelled massacres by the English who suffered death at the hands of their rivals, took place within the space of a year on opposite sides of the globe and in widely different overseas contexts. The first episode took place in Virginia in March 1622, when Opechancanough and his soldiers killed one-third of the English colonists in a surprise attack. The second episode transpired in February 1623 in the Spice Islands, when Dutch East India Company officials in Ambon suspected English East India Company employees of conspiring with Japanese soldiers to seize the trading post, interrogated and tried them, and executed twenty-one men. This episode, known in England by 1624 as the ' Amboyna massacre', endured as a meaningful frame of reference well into the eighteenth century. This article explores the particular contexts of each episode and analyses what violence meant to different participants. It investigates how each event became a 'massacre' to survivors and to observers in England. In both Virginia and Amboyna, the English were victims, not perpetrators, of violence, and thus these events offer an opportunity to explore how victims of violence deployed their ordeals, in pamphlets, images, plays, and songs, to further their own ends. Labelled as massacres, these two episodes acquired a meaning apart from the actual course of events, helping the English to reassess their overseas goals, to re-evaluate their prospects and to define themselves anew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eighteenth-century English common-law courts used petit juries in civil litigation to try issues of fact or find damages after defendants defaulted. In colonial Virginia, county sheriffs impaneled potential jurors for trials of the issue; before trial, litigants selected a 12-man jury during voir dire. By contrast, juries on writs of inquiry to ascertain damages were selected solely by sheriffs and reached verdicts under the sheriff's supervision. Scholarly consensus holds juror selection to have been prejudiced, but pure probability predictions generated with hypergeometric distributions indicate that on writs of inquiry sheriffs often picked jurors in a functionally random manner. This article presents a new test for identifying bias in jury selection by identifying improbable numbers of magistrates, constables, and grand jurors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates economic connections between Virginia frontier settlements and Pennsylvania during the period 1746-55. We explore how frontier debtors in remote Augusta County, Virginia, acquired Pennsylvania monetary obligations, what happened when debts involving Pennsylvania money were litigated in Augusta County, and what exchange rate was used in judgments for debts denominated in Pennsylvania money. We find that fluctuations in Augusta County exchange rates correlated to the overall regional market for monetary exchanges involving pounds sterling and Pennsylvania or Virginia money. A statistical tool called the two-tailed student t-test indicates the correlation was not the result of random chance. We therefore conclude that ordinary settlers in the Virginia backcountry were thoroughly acquainted with Pennsylvania market conditions at an earlier period than previously has been recognized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nineteenth-century maroons in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp formed communities within communities, whose members were set apart from others not so much by space (an impenetrable wilderness) but by the legal status they renounced, the fugitive status they embraced, and the common goal of creating meaningful lives neither fully within, nor completely apart from, surrounding slave society. The following analysis of one group of Great Dismal Swamp maroons offers scholars a new way to conceptualize marronage in nineteenth-century North America. Rather than look only to remote places for traces of maroon societies, researchers might also consider examining such communities in more settled areas, including centers of large-scale industrial operations, where fugitives carved out identities and negotiated their wages within a biracial labor system that relied upon and supported slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the conflict that ensued when the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (a New York City-based organization that opposed any form of legal film censorship) entered the debate over Virginia's state film censor board. Virginia's engagement with film censorship emerged out of its history and politics, particularly in regard to race relations. Elite white Virginians lived in fear both of federal intervention (with the specter of Reconstruction not far behind them) and of a local usurpation of political power by black Virginians. The National Board of Review (NBR) was largely ignorant of this situation, which worked against their goals and ability to cultivate reliable allies. In the 1910s and 1920s, film raised issues about authorities – locally based and oriented versus nationally oriented authority, private authority and municipal, state, and/or federal authority. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the online study and teaching of history. Particular focus is given to the authors' experience of designing two online, asynchronous courses for teachers, centering on Virginia history and U.S. history respectively. Details on the use of primary and secondary source materials in online teaching are presented. The authors emphasize the roles of flexibility, interaction, and feedback in online learning.

The British surrender at Yorktown proved one of the most decisive engagements in the history of the Atlantic world. While the American conduct of the campaign has been endlessly studied, the British side has been studiously neglected. This article seeks to show how the British army came to be stationed at Yorktown and why its occupation ended in disaster. Many accusations were made at the time as to who was responsible for the debacle. However, the most public recriminations were those exchanged by the two leading generals, Sir Henry Clinton and Earl Cornwallis. Clinton charged Cornwallis with responsibility for Yorktown on three counts. Firstly, he had entered Virginia without authorization, thereby dangerously extending Britain's military commitments. Secondly, it was Cornwallis who had chosen Yorktown as the site for an operational base in Virginia. Finally Cornwallis had failed to exercise proper judgement when faced by imminent danger of entrapment. However, analysis of the evidence reveals that Yorktown was a disaster principally of Clinton's making. It was Clinton who did most to extend the British effort in Virginia, and Clinton who changed the nature of the war there by insisting on the establishment of an enlarged naval facility. Finally it was Clinton who failed to see the impending danger or the need for revised orders to Cornwallis once that danger was clear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author focuses on the policies encouraged by dehumanization that lead to Genocide in North American Colony in Virginia in the seventeenth century. He states that the people that inhabited Virginia developed a thinking that peace in the state can only be possible if the Indians residing undergo a transformational change in the lifestyle as well as character. He informs that the leaders at that time of Virginia tried to make the Indians flee from the state. He describes the English people's behavior towards the Indians after their invasion at Jamestown colony in Virginia.

The article discusses the historical distribution of gasoline stations located on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, focusing on the methodologies used for establishing a historical geography database which includes fieldwork. Topics considered include patterns of the distribution of gasoline stations and changes in their locales over time, the reuse or abandonment of former gasoline stations, and the use of global positioning systems (GPS) to map locations.

The article reviews the exhibition "An American Turning Point: The Civil War in Virginia" at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia from February 4th to December 30th, 2011.

Located at the heart of what was once the capital of the Confederate States of America, Monument Avenue is 'Virginia's place to be recognized by Virginians'. For over a century the Richmond street's commemorative art paid homage to those labelled 'heroes' of the Confederacy, normalising and sanctioning a white, masculine, martial dominance that became increasingly incongruous with the city's demographics. In 1996, the hotly contested addition of a statue of native Richmonder Arthur Ashe, an African American tennis champion, challenged the avenue's master narrative. This project addresses the micro-geographies involved in the debate over where and how to site the Ashe statue and its perceived effects on Richmond's commodifiable sense of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the significant aspects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Writers' Project. The author provides an overview of the WPA guide "Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion" and mentions that the project supplements Virginia life histories from the 1930s and '40s. He also explores the role of the WPA Writers' project in exploring the life in the state.

The article discusses Confederate History Month in U.S. southern states and public disputes over how to commemorate the U.S. Civil War. The author reflects on the controversy and public outcry over a proclamation of Confederate History Month issued by Virginia Governor Robert F. McDonnell that omitted any mention of slavery. Emphasis is given to debates between Confederate sympathizers such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization and civil rights advocates such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The author also explores the centennial and sesquicentennial commemorations of the Civil War.

The authors trace the development and implementation of Virginia's History and Social Science standards-based accountability system from 1995 to 2009. They frame the study within an examination of the political ideologies that influence policy realization and unpack the relationship between ideological and epistemological beliefs about the nature of disciplinary knowledge and arguments regarding what knowledge is of most worth and whose voices should be included. While initial policy implementation created vociferous reactions, subsequent revisions have been met with silence. Such acquiescence, the authors suggest, reflects the ways in which high stakes testing as a vehicle for assessing learning has become normalized in Virginia. This shift in beliefs about education foreshadows the potential impact of the nationwide accountability movement and raises a concern that if Virginia ceased to test history and social science, its place within the school schedule would be lost to content areas that impact Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay explores the meaning of the term "terroir" in terms of the social life and customs of the residents of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Focusing on how food is a uniting factor to residents of the area, the author considers local recipes for Drum Head Stew, Wild Bear Sandwiches, and fish stew. An interview with sisters Gertrude and Viola Bell, former Hog Island residents, about historical celebrations of the Fourth of July, is presented.

The article focuses on the culture of information that have existed in Richmond, Virginia during the American Civil War. It notes that there was an enjoyment of the advantages of the availability of the two greatest technological innovations during wartime, such as the train and telegraph. These two source of information was said to have caused misinterpretation because the news being disseminated was often incomprehensible. It states that the history of Richmond during the Civil War became one of the information society in the making, where the demand for updated intelligence was also in conflict with the availability of its transmission. Moreover, the issue of censorship has been first established by Confederate president Jefferson Davis on the use of telegraphic communication.

This highlights the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture (OIEAHC) Conference, entitled The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624, which took place in March 2004 in Williamsburg, Virginia. The task of the meeting was to retell the story of Jamestown's settlement within the frame of Atlantic history, Native American history and World Systems scholarship. Conceived by Fredrika Teute, editor of publications for OIEAHC, and enacted and hosted by OIEHAC director Ronald Hoffman, the meeting filled three and one-half days with sessions revealing from various perspectives the tenuousness and marginality of Virginia in the world of 1607. The order of matters stated in the conference title—-Atlantic World first, Virginia second—was reflected in the proportion of talks. The first day treated the Native culture that preexisted English and Spanish settlement, interacted with it, and survived after contact. Representatives and leaders of Virginia's various Native peoples appeared on the program speaking putatively about oral history. Certain presentations require acknowledgment such as Philip Morgan's "The Caribbean and the Atlantic World," which decisively showed that, while the settlement on the James betokened an exercise of imperial ambition, the desires, dreams and the bulk of English maritime activities from 1550 to 1624 took place in the Caribbean.

In 1851, Elizabeth Southard was tried for the murder of William Walker in Richmond, Virginia. Although Southard was ultimately convicted, her case was of unusual complexity, because at every stage of the prosecution process the defense attorneys contested the racial status of Southard herself and two key witnesses. This article examines the various ways in which race was constructed in the course of Southard's trial and argues that the legal process of determining racial identity profoundly compromised the stark racial divide that was at the heart of Virginia's criminal law. Furthermore, evidence from Southard's trial suggests that the problems associated with determining racial identity were greatest in southern cities and particularly in those cases in which the race of a woman was at issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines Thomas Jefferson's response to Gabriel's Uprising, an abortive slave revolt of 1800 in Richmond. More specifically, it analyzes Jefferson's response to Virginia Governor James Monroe's request for advice concerning sentencing and postconviction relief of the rebels. It urges that Jefferson's counsel to deport rather than execute rebels followed naturally from his application of a branch of jurisprudence called criminal theory to the moral problem posed by white society's need to defend itself in the face of a justified insurrection. The argument builds on a letter Jefferson wrote to the jurist St. George Tucker in 1797 in the wake of the Haitian Revolution, and it: maintains that Jefferson's use of the terms 'justice' and 'necessity' in the context of analyzing the putative criminality of rebels' and state officials' use of violence unmistakably signaled the relevance of criminal theory to Tucker, and to Monroe, who had been trained in the law by Jefferson. The essay argues that the impact of the Haitian Revolution on Jefferson's thinking has been generally underestimated, and that Gabriel's Uprising had far better prospects for success than are generally acknowledged. While not discounting Jefferson's racism, the essay suggests that his recognition that slave rebels' behavior was justified flowed from a commitment to principled, universally applicable legal theory, and that this commitment is not easy to reconcile with revisionist portrayals of Jefferson as essentially pro-slavery in outlook. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the exhibition '1699: When Virginia Was the Wild West!,' at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia from May 1, 1999 to January 31, 2000.

Offers a look at the 1776 revolution in Virginia during the colonization of Great Britain. Categories of the revolution's social conflict; Effects of the 1775 Third Virginia Convention on the state's international trade; Ideological consequences of the Loudoun County uprising.

Discusses the martyrdom of eight Spanish Jesuits in 1571 in the region of Ajacan, or what is presently Chesapeake Bay on the western shore of Virginia. Role that the narrative of the events played in the formation of other cultural discourses; Death of the Jesuits after Indians attacked them; Reasons why the Jesuits' deaths were considered to be instant martyrdom.

Examines an oratorical piece on public culture and economic liberalism during the post-revolutionary Northern Virginia, 1780-1820. Cause of the American Revolution; Effects of independence on international economic relations; Relevance of orations in forging a sense of nationhood and shared community.

The article attempts to identify the significance of a body of verse in the literature of colonial Virginia, particularly commenting on the use of elegy and mock elegy in the Colonial South. It comments on poems written by Southern colonials, verses that appeared in the gazettes of Maryland and South Carolina in 1763 and examples of Southern Colonial elegiac verse.

Focuses on the origin of American politics and the nature of social and political stability in Virginia during 17th century. Misconceptions related to the concept of stability; Transformation of control regime into consociational polity between 1630 and 1642; Conversion of unicarmel structure of the nation's general assembly into bicameralism.

Compares the attitude and behavior of antebellum planters in colonial Virginia towards the European elite class known as 'junkers' during the political crises of 1860-61 and 1848. Importance of establishing functional and structural analogy between plantations and knights' estates; Nature of racism in both societies; Level of conservatism among planters and the junkers.

Highlights the creation of the State of West Virginia and the contribution of President Abraham Lincoln. Discussion on the secessionist impulse; Reorganized government of Virginia; Constitutional issues; Lincoln as a decision maker.

Assesses the economic impacts of preserving two Civil War battlefield sites in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and establishing a Valley-wide battlefield park. Direct or multiplier effects; Comparison of preservation options with agricultural use to determine foregone economic opportunities; Methods; Shift in activity from agriculture to service sectors of the economy.