Virginia Bookshelf – serie

This history of England's first ventures into the New World combines information gathered from excavations of sites with accounts from journals, letters and official records. The exploits of Sir Walter Ralegh, Captain John Smith, and the life and death of Pocahontas are illuminated.

In the summer of 1968, ten-year-old Dorie's brother Willie, a religious fanatic and suspected drug user, returns to town. His return becomes a catalyst for a string of tragic events and Dorie struggles to understand the discrimination in the world around her.

A memoir of life on a backwoods Virginia farm in the first half of the 20th century. Virginia Bell Dabney recalls the hardships of the Depression, the fire that destroyed her home and how her mother struggled to make a life for her family, but also finds much to rejoice in her country childhood.

A tale of a sophisticated couple going back to the land. The restlessness that compels Anna and Steadman to move from the city to a small mountain farm in Virginia is brought into high relief by the cycles of the natural world, and by the arrival of Anna's demonic twin sister.

Waters of Potowmack is a documentary history of the Potomac River and its wide, fertile basin - the setting for much of early United States history. A collage of primary accounts, it extends from the first explorers and colonists, the building of the Capitol, and the incidents of the Civil War through our recent past. Waters of Potowmack records the firsthand impressions of the settlers and surveyors of this river basin, an area that includes parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. In addition to offering an introduction to the geography, geology, and climate of the region, Metcalf's fascinating pastiche includes early descriptions of flora and fauna, and accounts of some of the earliest encounters between European settlers and indigenous peoples. Here, too, are the voices of Washington and Jefferson, of Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln, as well as the lesser-known stories of revolutionaries, mercenaries, and canal and road builders. And from diary and journal entries we follow the correspondence between Washington, Jefferson, and L'Enfant as they lay out the new Federal City. Selections from Civil War diaries focus on key battle sites, and primary accounts offer a new understanding of the motives of John Brown and John Wilkes Booth. The last section of Metcalf's engrossing book looks at the ruinous pollution of the river basin after the Second World War, at the rioting and looting of the 1960s, and at the despoliation of a land that at the book's beginning was described as an Eden, a paradise on earth. An evocative and moving book, this is a history of exploring, settling, rebelling, governing, rioting, building, and cultivating, all on the ""waters of Potowmack.

When Let Me Lie was first published in 1947, most reviewers missed the double meaning of the book's title. Deaf to James Branch Cabell's many-layered ironic wit, they read the book as a paean to the old South. Readers of this new paperback edition are unlikely to repeat the mistake. Let Me Lie is indeed a carefully researched and brilliantly written historical narrative of Virginia from 1559 to 1946 - focusing on Tidewater, Richmond, and the Northern Neck - but as a fictional scholar remarks in the book, Cabell's history is ""both accurate and injudicious."" Virginia's story of itself, Cabell claims, depends on illusion and myth, and his skill as a satirist allows him to construct and deflate these myths simultaneously. Ranging in topic from Don Luis de Velasco and Captain John Smith to Edgar Allan Poe and Ellen Glasgow, from Confederate heroes to the oddities of the post-Civil War Old Dominion, Let Me Lie remains compulsively readable, as history, entertainment, or both.