[PDF] The Commonplace Book Of William Byrd Ii Of Westover eBook

Author : Kevin Joel Berland
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 37,63 MB
Release : 2012-12-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0807839116

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William Byrd II (1674-1744) was an important figure in the history of colonial Virginia: a founder of Richmond, an active participant in Virginia politics, and the proprietor of one of the colony's greatest plantations. But Byrd is best known today for his diaries. Considered essential documents of private life in colonial America, they offer readers an unparalleled glimpse into the world of a Virginia gentleman. This book joins Byrd's Diary, Secret Diary, and other writings in securing his reputation as one of the most interesting men in colonial America. Edited and presented here for the first time, Byrd's commonplace book is a collection of moral wit and wisdom gleaned from reading and conversation. The nearly six hundred entries range in tone from hope to despair, trust to dissimulation, and reflect on issues as varied as science, religion, women, Alexander the Great, and the perils of love. A ten-part introduction presents an overview of Byrd's life and addresses such topics as his education and habits of reading and his endeavors to understand himself sexually, temperamentally, and religiously, as well as the history and cultural function of commonplacing. Extensive annotations discuss the sources, background, and significance of the entries.

Author : William Byrd
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 528 pages
File Size : 47,20 MB
Release : 2013
Category : History
ISBN : 1469606933

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Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover

Author : George Garrett
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 32,27 MB
Release : 2003-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780807128503

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Few if any are better endowed than George Garrett to comment on the general and the particular, the long and the short, of southern letters in our time. Garrett— a prolific and internationally renowned author of fiction, poetry, drama, and biography as well as a teacher, editor, critic, and frequent jurist for literary competitions—has been immersed in the writers and literature of his native region for almost a half century. Southern Excursions contains more than fifty of the best essays, reviews, and other short pieces of his career. For the connoisseur of good writing, this book is a depository, a treasure, a veritable time capsule of southern, literary, and American culture. Without sacrificing reverence for modern masters such as Faulkner, O’Connor, and Welty, Garrett has consistently embraced worthy new artists through the years, deftly and judiciously drawing the line between critical acclaim and popular success. Payton Davis, Shelby Foote, Walker Percy, William HoVman, Madison Jones, Reynolds Price, Robert Morgan, R. H. W. Dillard, Wendell Berry, Doris Betts, William Goyen, Mary Lee Settle, Randall Kenan, David Huddle, Allan Gurganus, Dorothy Allison—these are a few of the writers Garrett has championed. If some names sound less familiar, Garrett, in these pages, will inspire readers to swift investigation. The author’s charm, wit, and anecdotal style make reading Southern Excursions a delight, and yet there’s no mistaking his erudition. Wise like a prophet, with a talent scout’s enthusiasm, Garrett is not afraid to tell unwelcome truths, covering topics that include southern publishing houses and literary quarterlies, the alliance between writers and academia, the state of criticism and theory, and, most eloquently, the persistence of place, memory, and the Civil War as themes in southern letters. Southern Excursions is a book for the ages, stowing as it does the sage views of one as learned, respected— and modest—in his time as George Garrett. “My strong suggestion [to readers],” he states, “is to plunge in and fare forward. Experience the story before turning to or trusting the opinions and judgments of others, myself included.”

Author : John Lauritz Larson
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 21,96 MB
Release : 2019-11-08
Category : History
ISBN : 0812296672

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After humble beginnings as faltering British colonies, the United States acquired astonishing wealth and power as the result of what we now refer to as modernization. Originating in England and Western Europe, transplanted to the Americas, then copied around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this process locked together science and technology, political democracy, economic freedom, and competitive capitalism. This has produced for some populations unimagined wealth and material comfort, yet it has also now brought the global environment to a tipping point beyond which life as we know it may not be sustainable. How did we come to endanger the very future of life on earth in our heedless pursuit of wealth and happiness? In Laid Waste!, John Lauritz Larson answers that question with a 350-year review of the roots of an American "culture of exploitation" that has left us free, rich, and without an honest sense of how this crisis came to be. Larson undertakes an ambitious historical synthesis, seeking to illuminate how the culture of exploitation grew out of the earliest English settlements and has continually undergirded U.S. society and its cherished myths. Through a series of meditations on key concepts, the story moves from the starving times of early Jamestown through the rise of colonial prosperity, the liberation of the revolutionary generation, the launching of the American republic, and the emergence of a new global industrial power by the end of the nineteenth century. Through this story, the book explores the rise of an American sense of righteousness, entitlement, and destiny that has masked any recognition that our wealth and success has come at expense to anyone or anything. Part polemic, part jeremiad, and part historical overview, Laid Waste! is a provocative and bracing account of how the development of American culture itself has led us to today's crises.

Author : Dennis Todd
Publisher : Univ. of Tennessee Press
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 48,29 MB
Release : 2023-07-28
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1621908100

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William Byrd II was a prominent eighteenth-century Virginian who at the time of his death owned over 180,000 acres and employed laborers and enslaved Africans to work his land. His letters, diaries, and surveying documents have become key texts in the study of American history, and he is one of the most quoted and discussed figures of his era. Byrd himself was perhaps the early colonial epitome of a patriarch, and typically, when historians examine Byrd and the prominence of patriarchal thought in colonial Virginia, they examine his relationships with his immediate family. In this book, however, Dennis Todd examines the patriarchal relations between Byrd and the workers on his plantations—his apprentices, his wageworkers, his overseers, his white servants, and especially his slaves. In doing so, this book illuminates a neglected stage in the formation of slavery in Virginia. Todd argues that patriarchal principles, which are often assumed to have justified slavery and to have offered a template for slave management, in fact did neither. Byrd was not the only Virginian to wrestle with the contradictions between patriarchal values and the realities of slavery, but few were as articulate. In examining Byrd through the twin lens of slavery and patriarchy, Patriarchy in Peril makes an important contribution to our understanding of the man and his place in Virginia society as well as the contentious formation of early America.

Author : Kevin J. Hayes
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 437 pages
File Size : 42,79 MB
Release : 2015-05-19
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1316299171

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A History of Virginia Literature chronicles a story that has been more than four hundred years in the making. It looks at the development of literary culture in Virginia from the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to the twenty-first century. Divided into four main parts, this History examines the literature of colonial Virginia, Jeffersonian Virginia, Civil War Virginia, and modern Virginia. Individual chapters survey such literary genres as diaries, histories, letters, novels, poetry, political writings, promotion literature, science fiction, and slave narratives. Leading scholars also devote special attention to several major authors, including William Byrd of Westover, Thomas Jefferson, Ellen Glasgow, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Styron. This book is of pivotal importance to the development of American literature and of American studies more generally.

Author : Robert Beverley
Publisher : UNC Press Books
Page : 383 pages
File Size : 48,58 MB
Release : 2014-05-13
Category : History
ISBN : 1469607956

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While in London in 1705, Robert Beverley wrote and published The History and Present State of Virginia, one of the earliest printed English-language histories about North America by an author born there. Like his brother-in-law William Byrd II, Beverley was a scion of Virginia's planter elite, personally ambitious and at odds with royal governors in the colony. As a native-born American--most famously claiming "I am an Indian--he provided English readers with the first thoroughgoing account of the province's past, natural history, Indians, and current politics and society. In this new edition, Susan Scott Parrish situates Beverley and his History in the context of the metropolitan-provincial political and cultural issues of his day and explores the many contradictions embedded in his narrative. Parrish's introduction and the accompanying annotation, along with a fresh transcription of the 1705 publication and a more comprehensive comparison of emendations in the 1722 edition, will open Beverley's History to new, twenty-first-century readings by students of transatlantic history, colonialism, natural science, literature, and ethnohistory.

Author : Benjamin Stephen Haller
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 395 pages
File Size : 45,86 MB
Release : 2024-05-03
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1793643288

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This book explores the influence of classical texts upon early European settlers and inhabitants of the Tidewater region of Virginia, addressing how Greek and Roman literature and culture shaped and sometimes challenged prevailing assumptions about personhood, liberty, town planning, and representative government in Virginia during the period of its expansion from the fort at Jamestown to Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia. Ben Haller introduces the reader to the Ovid translation which George Sandys penned during his time in Virginia as Treasurer; William Strachey’s account of the wreck of the Sea Venture, likely one inspiration for William Shakespeare’s The Tempest; William Byrd II’s writings, including his secret diaries which record the intimate details of the life of an Indian Trader and plantation owner in the early eighteenth century; and Jefferson’s expansive Enlightenment Era appetite for knowledge classical and modern. Haller’s analysis of these texts is carefully anchored in a discussion of the cultural historical context of the English settlement of Virginia, the excavations of Pompeii, the eighteenth-century mania for Palladian architecture, the construction of the campus of the University of Virginia, and new Enlightenment ideals of personal liberty and human rights which came to the fore during Jefferson’s lifetime, and which he helped to enshrine in modern American political thought.