In the eighteenth century, Virginia's Shenandoah Valley became a key corridor for America's westward expansion through the Cumberland Gap. Known as New Virginia, the region west of the Blue Ridge Mountains set off the world of the farmer from that of the planter, grain and livestock production from tobacco culture, and a free labor society from a slave labor society.
In The Planting of New Virginia Warren Hofstra offers the first comprehensive geographical history of one of North America's most significant frontier areas. By examining the early landscape history of the Shenandoah Valley in its regional and global context, Hofstra sheds new light on social, economic, political, and intellectual developments that affected both the region and the entire North American Atlantic world.
Paying special attention to the Shenandoah Valley's backcountry frontier culture, Hofstra shows how that culture played a unique role in the territorial struggle between European empires and Native American nations. He weaves together the broad cultural and geographic threads that underlie the story of the valley's place in the early European settlement of eastern North America.
He also reveals the distinctive ways in which settlers shaped the valley's geography during the eighteenth century, a pattern that evolved from discrete open-country neighborhoods into a complex town and country settlement that would come to characterize-and in many ways epitomize-middle America. An important addition to scholarship of the geography and history of colonial and early America, The Planting of New Virginia, rethinks American history and the evolution of the American landscape in the colonial era.
Review: A thorough, wide-ranging analysis of the complex issues surrounding the white settlement of the Shenandoah Valley. -- Thomas J. Humphrey William and Mary Quarterly 2004 A welcome addition to the economic and geographic history of the valley, chronicling the area's transformation from an exchange to a market economy.
Choice 2005 Historians will welcome a new look at the geography and culture of the Shenandoah Valley... Hofstra furnishes a scholarly appraisal of how those who stopped short of the Gap and settled in the Valley created a 'New Virginia.' Far different from the planters of Tidewater and the Piedmont, these hardy settlers thrived in their own backwoods culture. -- Ann Lloyd Merriman Richmond Times-Dispatch 2004 A fascinating picture of the ways in which 18th-century Virginians crafted, controlled, and imagined their landscapes. -- Robert G.
Parkinson Virginia Quarterly Review 2005 This is a must read for anyone looking for information on the Shenandoah Valley during the colonial period. -- Katherine Rindt Potomac Appalachian 2004 Dense and well-argued... Hofstra meticulously matches... rural cultural mentalities with the geology and land covers of the Shenandoah subregion. -- Jack Temple Kirby American Historical Review 2005 Persuasively depicts the evolving landscape and society of Virginia's eighteenth-century Shenandoah Valley...
Required and pleasurable reading for anyone interested in the development of the early American frontier. -- Albert H. Tillson Jr. Journal of Southern History 2005 At once masterful synthesis and bold exploration... a history, not just of 'planting new Virginia,' but of planting... new America. -- Marion Nelson Winship Journal of American History 2005 Hofstra has ably woven together the many strands of the private and business lives of Shenandoah Valley residents during the formative colonial and early national eras...
Comprehensive and well-written. -- Keir B. Sterling Environmental History 2005 An important contribution to the growing body of literature on the backcountry... The definitive work on the development of the Shenandoah Valley landscape. -- Gabrielle M. Lanier Journal of Social History 2005 A masterful analysis of the first century of European settlement in the region...
An impressive body of primary research and historical and geographical literature. -- A. Glenn Crothers Virginia Magazine of History and
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