Dear VA-HISTers:

 

I would like to invite you to the next in the Library of Virginia's
noontime lectures.  On Wednesday, November 17, 2004, author Warren R.
Hofstra will present a talk on his most recent book The Planting of New
Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley published by
the Johns Hopkins University Press.  The book will be available for sale
and the author will sign copies of his book in the lobby after his
remarks.  This talk is co-sponsored by the Virginia Heritage Resource
Center's "Mining the Treasure House" lecture series.  The Library of
Virginia is located at 800 East Broad Street in downtown Richmond. 

 

Dr. Hofstra is the Stewart Bell Professor of History at Shenandoah
University in Winchester, Virginia, and an acknowledged expert on the
history of the Virginia backcountry.  His previous publications include
A Separate Place: The Formation of Clarke County, Virginia (1986), and
the edited volumes George Washington and the Virginia Backcountry
(1998), After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of
Virginia, 1800-1900 (2000), and Virginia Reconsidered: New Histories of
the Old Dominion (2003).  

 

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.  By examining the early landscape history of the
Shenandoah Valley in its regional and global context, Dr. Hofstra sheds
new light on social, economic, political, and intellectual developments
that affected both the region and the entire North American Atlantic
world.  One reviewer of Dr. Hofstra's book wrote:  

 

"The Planting of New Virginia is the product of years of patient,
meticulous research and careful historical interpretation. It
represents, in fact, a life's work. One of the most important
contributions this book makes to the scholarship of colonial America is
the success with which Hofstra places settlement in the Shenandoah
Valley, and the communities, cultural landscapes and commercial networks
that sprang from it, in the international context of strategic imperial
decisions. The result is a richly textured history of the Valley in the
eighteenth century that balances the aspirations of individual settlers
with the broader imperial concerns of British ministers and colonial
governors."-Carter L. Hudgins, Hofer Distinguished Professor of Early
American Culture and Historic Preservation at Mary Washington College. 

 

You can access the full schedule of events for the Library by clicking
on "News and Events" at: http://www.lva.lib.va.us.

 

Gregg Kimball

Director of Publications and Educational Services

804-692-3722

 

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