Virginians and Their Histories

"This volume presents a fresh interpretation of Virginia's history based on the author's more than four decades of researching and writing about all aspects of the subject. It incorporates new insights from scholarship on Virginia's Indians and women, slavery, religion, economic history, and social, cultural, demographic, and even climate changes. With illustrations and maps to augment the narrative, Virginians and Their Histories will allow readers for the first time to trace major themes in Virginia's long history through the words and eyes of people who experienced that history as well as made it. To write about Virginians as a whole, as some historians formerly did, excludes large portions of the population from consideration. Different groups of Virginians experienced their shared history in different ways. To state that Virginians believed something or experienced an event in a certain way is almost certainly to generalize inaccurately from one group to the whole. It is extremely difficult and almost always misleading to refer to Virginians as an undifferentiated population without regard to race, gender, or differences in wealth, social status, and geographic location"--

Brent Tarter is a retired historian and editor at the Library of Virginia, a founding editor of the Library's Dictionary of Virginia Biography project, the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals on various aspects of Virginia history, and the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of sixteen books, including The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia, A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia, Gerrymanders: How Redistricting Has Protected Slavery, White Supremacy, and Partisan Minorities in Virginia.