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Acknowledgments I have lived in Virginia and studied aspects of its history and culture for more than forty years, for approximately one-tenth of its English-language history. During that time I have read all of the leading monographs and biographies of prominent people and discussed Virginia’s history with scores of researchers who generously shared their insights with me. That pointed me toward some of the episodes and sources on which these essays are based, but my own research in the primary sources of all decades of Virginia’s English-language history led me to the other events and sources and shaped my own perspective on Virginia’s political past. During the composition of these essays, I reread most of the major books on Virginia’s political history and culture, some of them for the severalth time. Even though in many instances I depart from the interpretations in the existing historical literature, I readily acknowledge the importance of the many valuable insights and even of the occasional false leads that I found there. Because none embraces the whole, none truly inspired or guided this inquiry, and I went back to the primary sources to free my mind, insofar as possible, from the perceptions and interpretations of other people (many of them good friends who produced excellent scholarship) so that I might reevaluate the evidence afresh. I particularly want to thank the late Professor Edward E. Younger, of the University of Virginia, who introduced me to Virginia’s history in 1971; Penelope Kaiserlian, director, Richard Holway, acquisitions editor, Martha Farlow, design and production manager, and Mark Mones, project editor, of the University of Virginia Press; and Susan Lee Foard, editor. Without in any way implicating any of them individually I also thank my many current and former colleagues and friends at the Library of Virginia from whom I learned much during a tenure there of almost forty years and with whom I discussed many aspects of Virginia’s history and on whom I inflicted some of the raw ideas that developed into the parts of this whole. One of them, John G. Deal, read the first version of the manuscript and offered many valuable critical comments . So did my friends John d’Entremont and Warren M. Billings who read the manuscript for the press and offered many helpful suggestions. The illness and the death in February 2012 of my longtime friend and colleague Sara B. Bearss deprived me and the readers of her keen insights and the benefits of her deft editorial pencil during the period of final revision. viii acknowledgments Some of the essays have appeared in other guises and also benefited from comments and advice of other people. The prologue benefited from the comments of Ryan K. Smith, Philip J. Schwarz, Marion Nelson, Robin Lind, Jon Kukla, Terri Halperin, Joshua Eckhardt , and Mathias Bergmann, members of the informal Richmond group known as Fall Line Early Americanists. Another version of “True Religion and a Civil Course of Life” was the opening oral presentation at the symposium “From Jamestown to Jefferson: The Evolution of Religious Authority in Colonial Virginia” at Virginia Wesleyan College, Norfolk, on 6 September 2007. It was subsequently published as “Evidence of Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” in Paul Rasor and Rich Bond, eds., From Jamestown to Jefferson: Religious Authority in Colonial Virginia (Charlottesville, 2011), 17–42, and appears here with permission of the publisher in expanded form but without some historiographical commentary. Both versions owe much to many years of conversations on this and related topics with Jon Kukla, Thomas E. Buckley, SJ, Edward L. Bond, and Warren M. Billings; and it also received constructive criticism from Doug Winiarski, Mark Valeri, Marion Nelson, Mark McGarvie, Isabelle Richman, and Woody Holton, members of the Fall Line Early Americanists. Portions of “The Grievances of the People” appeared in a different form in a historiographical essay entitled “Bacon’s Rebellion, the Grievances of the People, and the Political Culture of Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 119 (2011): 3–41, and appears here with permission of the editor but without some historiographical commentary. Both versions owe much to many years of conversations with Jon Kukla and Warren M. Billings and received constructive criticism from Wil M. Verhoeven , Doug Winiarski, Marion Nelson, and Sarah Meacham, members of the Fall Line Early Americanists. “The Grandees of Government” profited from the critical commentary of Mark Valeri, Doug Winiarski, Ryan K. Smith, John Pagan, Marion Nelson , Sarah Meacham, Woody Holton...

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