A further comment on the Carter's Grove sale: note that the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation justifies the sale as follows: '"Our decision was guided by a thorough evaluation of Carter's Grove's relevance to Colonial Williamsburg's interpretive focus. Our mission is to tell the story of citizenship and becoming America in the 18th century," said Campbell [the Foundation's president and chairman]. "This is best accomplished in the Historic Area, where we present and interpret Revolutionary War-era Williamsburg. Carter's Grove, with its multiple stories to tell, does not support this strategic focus."' I find that statement unbelievable. How is it possible "to tell the story of citizenship and becoming America in the 18th century," above all in Virginia, without incorporating the realities of the plantation world, including of course its basis in slavery and the still significantly Africanized world of the vast majority of Virginia's African Americans, the agricultural workers who never came near what is now the Historic Area? Campbell's words imply that four decades of transformative scholarship on Virginia, Virginians, the Revolution, and the evolution of American citizenship and American identity are being fundamentally disregarded in favor of a disembodied, sanitized "story" that flattens the truths and complexities of Virginia's and America's history. Even if the Foundation's purpose is to celebrate the nation we have become today--a defensible goal, in my view--how is it possible to do that without thoroughly integrating our knowledge of the most important facts about the nation's historical foundations in eighteenth-century Virginia? If anyone has been to Colonial Williamsburg recently and can reassure me on these points, I'd love to hear it. Last week's article in the NY Times that Suzanne Levy noted (thanks, Suzanne) doesn't really do that: for example, how would the writer have learned that eighteenth-century Virginia was "not just a society that owned slaves, but a society organized around slavery" if she hadn't happened to visit the soon-to-be inaccessible reconstructed slave quarters at, yes, Carter's Grove? I'm not a Williamsburg-basher--on the contrary, a childhood visit to Colonial Williamsburg (and Carter's Grove) was the spark that led me to the study of history--but this sale and the justification offered for it strike me as a tragically misguided indication that Colonial Williamsburg may truly have lost its way. --Jurretta J. Heckscher To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html