Correction to the reference in my last post to that NY Times article Suzanne Levy pointed out! I searched the Times's archive for "Carter's Grove," and clicked without noticing the date on the most recent article--which turned out to be a rather upbeat report from September 2000 lauding, among other things, Williamsburg's commitment to "social history." I should have done the search Suzanne suggested, on "Colonial Williamsburg." That of course turns up the right article, the December 31 account that is thoroughly depressing: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/31/us/31preserve.html. Notice, though, that the article--like Colonial Williamsburg, apparently?--sees the entire issue of Carter's Grove in terms of the predicament of "house museums." Carter's Grove should not be a "house museum." It should be a plantation historical site that educates the public about the social, cultural, and economic foundations of eighteenth-century Williamsburg, colonial Virginia, and the nation--a site that happens to have an architecturally notable house on it. Carter's Grove, the house, is all but irrelevant to the history represented at Colonial Williamsburg. Carter's Grove, the plantation, opens the complex historical understanding without which Colonial Williamsburg is nothing more than an ahistorical consumer fantasy. --Jurretta J. Heckscher To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html