Content area
Full Text
The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 * Edited by Peter C. Mancall * Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007 * xii, 596 pp. * $65.00 cloth; $27.50 paper
One in a cascade of books that streamed forth in the run-up to the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, this anthology owes its origin to a conference that the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture hosted in Williamsburg, from 4 to 7 March 2004. The gathering was a large, genial mix of scholars-some senior, some mid-career, some junior-and plain folk who listened attentively and responded enthusiastically to some four dozen formal presentations. Peter Mancall selected fifteen of those papers for inclusion in the volume and wrote the introduction. He also included three additional pieces whose authors offer a series of observations that conclude the book.
Mancall's quite serviceable introduction fulfills its intended purpose by affording readers a clear guide to the arrangement of the book and its interpretative underpinnings. The essayists, notes Mancall, "aim to quite literally place the beginnings of Virginia in the history of the larger Atlantic Basin," meaning that they subscribe to an Atlantic World point of view that has enjoyed currency for the past two decades and more (p. 2). As for the...