Virginia Books

This is the most useful guide to collectable china that I have found. It is not only an exhaustive reference guide to Homer Laughlin's "Virginia Rose", but provides much information about other types of china as well. This book provides details and information that you can't find elsewhere.

Well researched, well written. A fascinating read and reference if you're into colonial history.

While Brock's prose can be a bit stuffy by contemporary standards, this is still a seminal work in the field of architectural history and well worth review and ownership. The photographs by Francis Benjamin Johnston are hauntingly beautiful and are the standard by which architecture photographs are still judged today. Published in a limited edition by the Dale Press in Richmond VA 1930.

When I was telling a friend that I'd recently purchased a home in Norfolk, he smiled at me and said, "I bet you bought a house in Colonial Place!" In response, I asked him, "Yes, you're right, but how'd you know?"

"Easy," he replied. "Anyone who loves old houses as much as you do just wouldn't feel comfortable in any other neighborhood."

And it was soon after my new husband and I moved into our 1920s home in Colonial Place, that another friend gave us this book as a housewarming gift. The quality of this hardcover book and the clarity of its photos are remarkable and the sheer quantity of the archival photos is beyond remarkable!

If you're just an old soul (like me) who loves to look at photos that tell the story of a bygone era, you'll cherish this book.

"Colonial Place and Riverview" is an interesting read and something no resident of Norfolk should be without. The Riverview/Colonial Place neighborhoods have a rich and fascinating history and it's *wonderful* that the books' authors took the time (and effort and expense) to create a permanent written record of this rich history.

Although the book's title suggests it's primarily of regional interest, I'd think every resident of Virginia would enjoy reading more about this historic neighborhood on the East Coast of the Commonwealth.

Colonial Virginia's Cooking Dynasty presents two cookbooks from eighteenth-century Virginia. One is an anonymous work dating from 1700; the other is the 1739-1743 cookbook of Jane Bolling Randolph, a desecendant of Pocahontas and John Rolfe. Editor and historical archaeology expert Katharine Harbury offers introductions and analyses of the cookbooks themselves, and links these enduring works to the 1824 classic "The Virginia House-wife" by Mary Randolph. A comprehensive and in-depth portrait that reveals much in the evolution of cookbooks and housekeeping instructionals, at once both nostalgic and containing a wealth of information that remains quite practical throughout the centuries. A "must-have" especially for cookbook collectors.

The end of slavery in the French Caribbean is a story that has many facets. This book looks at one of the smaller islands (Guadalupe) and tracks its progress as it tries to free itself from the grips of slavery. Dubios tells a very good story and it is well written. The book focuses on Guadalupe but also gives a sense of what is happening in the entire British and French Caribbean. Dubios in his other books really provides a complete picture of what is occurring in the Caribbean and they are all recommended.

this is my favorite romance ever. It was written around 1900 and beautifully portrays the mind and responsibilies of a British woman in that time.

What a great book. I was one of the Baldwin girls, living there 1965/1966. I had no idea I was part of this history. I am very grateful to Grace for writing this book. -Betty Wagner

In Commonwealth Catholicism: A History Of The Catholic Church In Virginia, Jesuit Gerald Fogarty (William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Religious Studies and History at the University of Virginia) brings the people, places, and events that shaped the Virginia church vividly to life. He engagingly surveys the inhospitable colonial period, to the Revolutionary War, to the Civil War, down through Vatican II. Here is a dynamic history of bishops, priests, nuns, politicians, advocates, enemies, and the laity. We meet such remarkable personalities as Father Matthew O'Keefe (who pulled a pair of revolvers on two men who had been sent to assassinate him) and Father William L. Lane (a black priest who worked tirelessly to create a Catholic presence among African Americans); and a host of others. Very highly recommended reading for students of American religious history in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, Commonwealth Catholicism is an impressive work of painstaking research, impeccable standards of scholarship, as well as a skilled and distinctive talent for narrative writing.

Dr. Carolyn Earle Billingsley has made a major breakthrough in American, especially Southern, historiography. She has elevated genealogy into the first rank of scholarly tools for understanding society and what springs from it. In the process she has overturned former conclusions as to how the Southern frontier was settled and developed. The core element is communities of kinship.

They have been right under our noses all along. Although writers have noted the importance of kinships episodically, they have explored them indifferently. It is common practice for biographers to devote a few pages to family background but little more. One extraordinary exception was Robert A. Caro who described President Johnson's families and environment in the Texas Hill Country in vivid detail. You could almost see little Lyndon as an incipient statesman. A friend wisely observed, though, that we do not know what cultural baggage those families brought to those hills and where they got it.

Dr. Billingsley's process opens up vast possibilities for research among families and persons for whom manuscript and printed documentation is skimpy or virtually non-existent, which is to say, most of them. As a longtime manuscript librarian I know how spotty the records are. Many a worthy in his or her time is now unknown when the opposite was the case in their own time and place.

Dr. Billingsley has not only theorized about the process but also demonstrated it in a study of a migrating, changing community of kinship, one without much documentation beyond genealogy. She has shown us how to do it. She has identified the core element of Southern society that defined its culture, politics, economics, and religion. As she noted, church history is incomplete if you are unaware of the familial interconnections of the clergy among themselves and communities of kinship.

Reading this book, I felt like I was reading about my own community of kinship, a most useful term, from Virginia and, especially South Carolina, to Alabama and westward. Our complex was quite larger and more concentrated in one region. In our principal county, the metropolis of Birmingham rose among us. Large numbers of us stayed and, having developed a rural society from scratch, participated in making a city.

Perhaps her Earles connect to our Earles in South Carolina and Alabama, two galaxies touching at the edges. One of our prominent relatives was a neighbor of her kinship community in Bibb County, Alabama. Cases in point!