Old Southampton

My second book, Old Southampton: Politics and Society in a Virginia County, 1834-1869 (University Press of Virginia, 1992), examined a Southern microcosm for which uniquely good records survive.  Southampton’s poll lists—the best for any locality in the United States—reveal partisan allegiances over time (voting was a public act in Virginia before the Civil War).  The book gains a human face because Southampton was home to two diligent diarists, Elliott L. Story and Daniel W. Cobb, whose journals tell much about everyday life.  Southampton also was home to the famed slave rebel, Nat Turner, and to the most accomplished Southern-born general in the Union army, George Henry Thomas.  Old Southampton was brought to the attention of the wider reading in public in Virginia Cavalcade (Winter 1993).

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Reviews of Old Southampton

“a searching and original and thought-provoking analysis . . . based upon extraordinarily thorough research in unusually rich local history resources. . . . It contains brilliant insights.”—Brent Tarter, Richmond Times-Dispatch, 27 December 1992, feature article in which Times-Dispatch book critics selected their favorite 1992 books.

“Old Southampton is a model local study that admirably illustrates state and national concerns as well . . . . [It] tells its important story in an engaging narrative that holds implications for other parts of the prewar South”—Jane Turner Censer, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography

“After reading this book, few will doubt the value of sophisticated, contextualized local studies for understanding even the largest themes in American history.”—Michael L. Nicholls, Journal of Southern History