If You Want to Know More...

 

Below are some useful resources that fire up the imagination with curiosity and wonder; curiosity to learn details beyond the facts, and wonder at the human will to survive, manage, and thrive.

 

Click on the Amazon.com Review link for each Amazon editorial review. It takes you directly to the page at the Amazon site that contains additional reviews and ordering information.

 

You can also see other books I've been reading and using for research, and check out some of my reviews on Goodreads. It's a great source to discover books read, evaluated, and recommended by fellow readers, as well.

250 Years in Fauquier County: A Virginia Story

by Kathi Ann Brown, Walter Nicklin, John T. Toler

 

Amazon.com Review (from the Amazon.com website)

 

Beginning with the early interactions between Native Americans and European explorers and settlers, this history traces three and a half centuries of change in Fauquier County, Virginia. Commissioned by the Fauquier Historical Society to commemorate the county’s 250th anniversary, this engrossing narrative tells the story of the men and women, black and white, who built the region’s farms, plantations, schools, and churches.

 

Individual biographies are interwoven with a social, political, and military history of the American Revolution and Civil War, allowing crucial events in the county’s history to come alive. This book also explores Fauquier’s depressed economy after the Civil War and shows how the area’s location and natural beauty drew wealthy outsiders to purchase estates in the early part of the twentieth century. After midcentury, the enormous expansion of the Washington suburbs ignited a heated and ongoing debate over the county’s position on growth and development.

 

Related here is the fascinating story of a historically significant county. The volume has more than two hundred illustrations, some displaying the county’s stunning beauty, which enhance the book throughout.

​

 

First People: The Early Indians of Virginia

by Keith Egloff   (Editor), Deborah Woodward (Editor)

 

Amazon.com Review (from the Amazon.com website)

 

Incorporating recent events in the Native American community as well as additional information gleaned from publications and public resources, this newly redesigned and updated second edition of First People brings back to the fore this concise and highly readable narrative. Full of stories that represent the full diversity of Virginia’s Indians, past and present, this popular book remains the essential introduction to the history of Virginia Indians from the earlier times to the present day.

 

 

 

 

​

 

Fauquier During the Proprietorship; A Chronicle of the Colonization and Organization of a Northern Neck County

H. C. Groome

 

Amazon.com Review (from the Amazon.com website)

 

A new reprint of the classic genealogy or local history book titled "Fauquier During the Proprietorship; A Chronicle of the Colonization and Organization of a Northern Neck County". Written by H. C. Groome and originally published in 1927.

 

By  T. Cole:

This is a classic -- it is essentially the standard for a history of the early years of Fauquier County, Virginia. Mr. Groome follows the progression of the county from the first residents in the area when John Smith explored up the Chesapeake, to the dissolution of the proprietorship of Lord Fairfax during the American Revolution. The text is slowed by some details that might not be of interest to the casual reader, but is well worth the time of anyone seeking to know how this county in Northern Virginia was first settled and organized by the English.

 

Attention is also given here to the colonial roads, towns, parishes, the origins and workings of the proprietorship of the Northern Neck, and, of course, the county. There is also a chapter on the unique German settlement of Germantown.

​

 

A Pride of Place: Three Hundred Years of Architectural History in Fauquier County

 Kimberly Prothro Williams

 

Amazon.com Review (from the Amazon.com website)

 

A Pride of Place, the result of a quarter-century’s worth of painstaking research and collection, presents the first comprehensive architectural and historic inventory of the widely diverse and irreplaceable rural residences of Fauquier County, Virginia. Hundreds of photographs and illustrations, each accompanied by informative text, provide a fascinating and helpful overview of the county’s rich architectural heritage.

 

 

​

 

White Pillars: The Architecture of the South

 J. Frazer Smith

 

Amazon.com Review (from the Amazon.com website)

 

Fantastic illustrated history of Southern regions, mansions....

By  Beyond-Is-Within Also

 

This underexposed 1941 title is a landmark architectural *and* broadly scaled historic/cultural study featuring hundreds of early Southern houses, mainly large and larger, with over 60 of them marvelously captured in full-page pen and ink drawings -- lovingly rendered by the accomplished architect/historian author!

 

The illustrations are just magically atmospheric, as rendered in a variety of styles and exquisitely composed with both buildings and grounds "in their prime". Included are many detailed floor plans and much technical info about the architecture and construction.

 

Sections of the "Lower Mississippi Valley Country" surveyed include: West of the Alleghenies -- Nashville and Kentucky Bluegrass regions; Along the Natchez Trace -- Tennessee and Mississippi country; Natchez proper and the Louisiana Felicianas and Bayou country; Mobile and Alabama "Black [soil] Belt"; and houses along the Mississippi River.

​

 

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

 Toni Morrison

 

Amazon.com Review (from the Amazon.com website)

 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.

 

Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.

 

Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.

 

"By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America."

--Chicago Tribune

 

"Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer."

The New York Times Book Review

​

 

Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field Hardcover

 Mick Gidley (Editor, Introduction)

 

Amazon.com Review (from the Amazon.com website)

 

In Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field, Mick Gidley provides an intimate and informative glimpse of Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) and his associates as they undertook their work in the early decades of the twentieth century. Photographer Curtis embarked on an epic quest to document through word and picture the traditional cultures of Native Americans in the western United States—cultures that he believed were inevitably doomed. Curtis’s project became the largest anthropological enterprise undertaken in this country and yielded the monumental work The North American Indian (1907–30). Its publication was a watershed in the anthropological study of Native Americans and inspired the first full-length documentary film, popular magazine articles, books for young readers, lectures, and photography exhibitions. Housing a wealth of ethnographic information yet steeped in nostalgia and predicated upon the assumption that Native Americans were a “vanishing race,” Curtis’s work has been both influential and controversial, and its vision of Native Americans must still be reckoned with today.

 

Gidley draws on a wide array of unpublished or uncollected reminiscences, reports, letters, field notes, and magazine and newspaper articles. The reports and reflections by Curtis and the project’s ethnological assistants, memoirs by Curtis family members, and eyewitness accounts by newspaper reporters afford an unprecedented look at the process of anthropological fieldwork as it was commonly practiced during this period. This book also sheds light on the views of Curtis and his contemporaries concerning their enterprise and the Native peoples they worked with and provides a clearer sense of how both Native Americans and the mainstream American public perceived their efforts.

​