By recovering a largely forgotten English Renaissance mindset that regarded sovereignty and Providence as being fundamentally entwined, Alexander Haskell reconnects concepts historians had before treated as separate categories and argues that the first English planters in Virginia operated within a deeply providential age rather than an era of early modern entrepreneurialism. These men did not merely settle Virginia; they and their London-based sponsors...

Historian Thomas S. Kidd shows how the fiery Patrick Henry cherished a vision of America as a virtuous republic with a clearly circumscribed central government. These ideals brought him into bitter conflict with other Founders and were crystallized in his vociferous opposition to the U.S. Constitution.

Scholars have long known that African Americans in the antebellum South vigorously resisted slaveholder control, but less has been known about how slave resistance shaped antebellum politics. Roots of Secession examines the relationship between Virginia's political system and its restive slave population during the turbulent decade leading up to the war. Using recent scholarship on slave resistance, William Link reconsiders the politics of secession...

Virginia 1619 provides an opportunity to reflect on the origins of English colonialism around the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic world. As the essays here demonstrate, Anglo-Americans have been simultaneously experimenting with representative government and struggling with the corrosive legacy of racial thinking for more than four centuries. Virginia, contrary to popular stereotypes, was not the product of thoughtless, greedy, or impatient English...

When Mark Warner left office in 2006 with an 80 percent approval rating, TIME magazine called him one of 'America's Five Best Governors'. Virginia was ranked the best-managed state in the nation, the best state for business and the best state for educational opportunity. When Warner began his term in 2002, the commonwealth was in the midst of its worst fiscal crisis in forty years, and partisan bickering had brought political discourse in Richmond...