Bassett Cadillac Virginia

52-page book includes Virginia History (1607 to the present), Virginia Geography (including regions, natural resources, farm crops), Virginia Civics (including Commonwealth, politics, government, and historical documents) and Virginia Economics (including land use, population, transportation, money and banking). Also covers Virginia Indians, Jamestown and the Virginia Colony, slavery in Virginia, social life in the early colonies, Virginia in the Revolution, Virginia in the Civil War (including Nat Turner's rebellion) and Virginia People (including George Washington, George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Patrick Henry, Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson, among many others). The book concludes with a glossary, appendix, gazetteer of place names, bibliography, and other educational information and graphics. For fun, the book includes 9 Virginia historical characters and a Virginia fact-based board game.

In their introduction to Virginia Reconsidered, Kevin Hardwick and Warren Hofstra note that "Virginia's history is powerfully situated, in both the popular and the scholarly imagination." Even recalling only a handful of the many memorable figures and events of Virginia history -- George Washington, Stonewall Jackson, Patrick Henry's declamation at St. John's Church -- it is difficult to disagree. But Virginia Reconsidered, a richly diverse and innovative collection of pioneering essays, goes beyond simply recounting the exploits of famous figures or the major turning points in the state's history. Probing deep currents of historical change and the revealing experiences of lesser-known Virginians, the fourteen essays offer teachers and general readers a fuller approach to Virginia's history, one that gives important context to the state's disparate people and events. Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman's essay on seventeenth-century Middlesex County, for example, details the decades-long effort of men like Arthur Nash to buy land and the struggle of subsequent generations to make the land into viable farms. This essay provides both a tale of economic independence and a history of early Virginia land development in miniature. Woody Holton explores the aspirations of enslaved Virginians during the revolutionary crisis, and demonstrates the connections between their hopes and actions and the decision of Virginia's planters to declare independence from Great Britain. Essays like Holton's investigate the fascinating but forgotten corners of Virginia history that are indeed its true foundation.