HIS 281 - Supplemental Readings
Watch this site for recommended readings which can legally be placed on line.
Click here for an amazing poem, "Washington Crossing the Delaware", by David Schulman.
Former class member Dick Shaw has located a couple of websites for us, each with brief selections from the diaries of William Byrd II of Westover, called by one historian "The Great American Gentleman". Please read through both sites before the October 30th class meeting. One site includes some questions you might consider, but remember your assignment is to come up with an appropriate motto for the Byrd family coat-of-arms!
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/ushist/workbook/tinprs3a.htm
http://longman.awl.com/history/primarysource_3_1.htm
For background information on and pictures of Byrd and his home at Westover on the James and analysis of A History of the Dividing Line Between North Carolina and Virginia (Byrds's account of a surveying party of which he was a member), see the following site:
http://pantheon.cis.yale.edu/~thomast/essays/sam/sam1.html
Click here for an essay Patrick Reed wrote summarizing Edmund Morgan's argument for the long-term significance of Bacon's Rebellion. If you are not reading Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom, please read this essay before the November 2nd class meeting.
Click here for John Smith's Account of the Starving Time of 1609-10;
Click here for Some Contemporary Explanations for Virginia's Early Hardships;
Click here for John Rolfe's Letter Requesting Permission to Marry Pocahontas;
Click here for Richard Frethorne's Letter Describing the Miseries of Early Jamestown;
Dick Shaw has also brought the following web sites to my attention. Of particular interest may be material on Pocahontas in the Virginia Indians section at the first site. Some of it overtly challenges the image of Pocahontas as a symbol of the hopes for a multiracial society:
http://geog.gmu.edu/gess/classes/geog380/vageog.html
http://wsrv.clas.virginia.edu/~msk5d/hariot/main.html
Former class member Diane Fochtman has recommended the following web sites:
The National Park Service
http://www.nps.gov
Colonial National Historical Park (Jamestown)
http://www.nps.gov/colo/
Colonial Williamsburg
http://www.history.org
APVA Jamestown Rediscovery
http://www.apva.org
Africans in America is an excellent PBS documentary on slavery. The following web site on the series contains a great deal of material on Virginia's role in the institution of slavery (Jamestown, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Gabriel's and Nat Turner's Rebellions, etc.):