The Northern Neck runs from Falmouth in Stafford County all the way down to Windmill Point in Lancaster County, bounded by the Rappahannock River to the south and the Potomac River to the north. Now it’s a sleepy section of Virginia but it was once called the Athens of the New World.
What a foreign world it seems to us today—the antebellum Northern Neck--where wealthy white plantation owners bought and sold slaves with ease along with the services of bound whites for years at a time. How could such a system that relied on keeping people in their places and maintaining the established order bring forth some of the greatest leaders of the Revolutionary period? History is complicated, and Accommodating Revolutions digs into court documents and newspaper accounts to flesh out what was going on with those who served the gentry as the winds of political and religious upheaval shook Virginia.
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Virginia's Northern Neck: A Pictorial History is filled with photos and illustrations that, along with informative text, give an lively dimension to the region's past, from early settlements to steamboat days to 20th-century lives well-lived.
In the decades following the Civil War, Chesapeake Bay became the scene of a life and death struggle to harvest the oyster, one of the most valuable commodities on the Atlantic coast. In this book, noted historian and author John Wennersten tells the stories of watermen, law enforcement officers, government officials, Bay scientists, immigrants, and oyster shuckers involved in the oyster trade. (From the publisher's description)
Inventor of the telephone and teacher of the hearing impaired, Bell kept his summer home at Colonial Beach in Westmoreland County, now a bed & breakfast inn.
Robert Carter III was born into the highest circles of Virginia's Colonial aristocracy, neighbor and kin to the Washingtons and Lees and a friend and peer to Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. But in 1791, Carter severed his ties with this elite at the stroke of a pen. Having gradually grown to feel that what he possessed was not truly his, clashing repeatedly with his neighbors, his friends, government officials, and, most poignantly, his own family, he set free nearly five hundred slaves in the largest single act of liberation in the history of American slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation. (From the publisher's description)
"There are few American families that feature such a collection of characters, both heroic and ignoble, who have made such a mark on history as the Lees. In The Lees of Virginia, Paul Nagel chronicles seven generations of Lees, covering over two hundred years of accolades and scandals. We meet Thomas Lee, who dreamed of America as a continental empire, and his son, Arthur Lee, who created a political storm with his accusations against Benjamin Franklin. Arthur's cousin was Light-Horse Harry Lee, a controversial cavalry officer in the Revolutionary War, whose wild real estate speculation led to imprisonment for debt and finally self-exile in the Caribbean. One of Harry's sons, Henry Lee, further disgraced the family by seducing his sister-in-law and frittering away Stratford, the Lees' ancestral home. It was a third son, Robert E. Lee, who would become the family's redeeming figure, a brilliant tactician still revered for his lofty character and military success. In these and numerous other portraits, Nagel discloses how, from 1640 to 1870, a family spirit united the Lees, making them a force in Virginian and American affairs."
(From the publisher's description)
This is a compilation of speeches by a noted Northern Neck historian, augmented by many illustrations. The subjects include the Northern Neck's early settlement, speech patterns of the gentry and others, the "villaines" Moll Flanders and Henry Esmond, crime & punishments generally, a colonial church,
From Tom Lee to Robert E. Lee, who made the fateful decision to turn from the nation he loved to defend the state he loved more, the Lees of Virginia dominated both their local and our national landscape. From the publisher's description
