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Lorena Walsh offers an enlightening history of plantation management in the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland, ranging from the founding of Jamestown to the close of the Seven Years' War and the end of the "Golden Age" of colonial Chesapeake agriculture. Walsh focuses on the operation of more than thirty individual plantations and on the decisions that large planters made about how they would run their farms. She argues that, in the mid-seventeenth century, Chesapeake planter elites deliberately chose to embrace slavery. Prior to 1763 the primary reason for large planters' debt was their purchase of capital assets--especially slaves--early in their careers. In the later stages of their careers, chronic indebtedness was rare. Walsh's narrative incorporates stories about the planters themselves, including family dynamics and relationships with enslaved workers. Accounts of personal and family fortunes among the privileged minority and the less well documented accounts of the suffering, resistance, and occasional minor victories of the enslaved workers add a personal dimension to more concrete measures of planter success or failure.
Austen After 200 explores our contemporary relationship with Jane Austen in the wake of the bicentenaries of her death and the first publication of her novels. The volume begins by looking at Austen’s popular appeal and at how she is consumed today in diverse cultural venues such the digisphere, blogosphere, festivals and book clubs. It then offers new approaches to the novels within various critical contexts, including adaptation studies, fan fiction, intertextuality, and more. Collecting these new essays in one volume enables a unique view of the crossovers and divergences in engagements with Austen in different settings, and will help a comparative approach between the popular and the academic to emerge more fully in Austen studies. The book gathers insights from a range of contributors invested in new reading spaces in order to show the creative ways in which we are all adapting as we continue to read Austen’s works.
The series of articles entitled "Virginia Gleanings in England" originally appeared in "The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography." The complete "Virginia Gleanings" series, assembled here in book form, comprises some eighty-five articles, the bulk of them contributed by Lothrop Withington from his post in London. The "gleanings" consist of abstracts of English wills and administrations relating to Virginia and Virginians and bear reference to heirs and issue, family members, administrators, property, bequests, places of residence, and dates of emigration, shedding light on the English origins of Virginia families of the 17th and 18th centuries, and naming some 15,000 persons in passing. These family "gleanings" are furthermore extended backwards and forwards in a remarkable series of textual annotations. The articles are reprinted here in the order in which they appeared in the Magazine and are followed by a complete index of names.