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Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Volume 3 (Caperton-Daniels) * Sara B. Bearss, John G. Deal, Donald W. Gunter, Marianne E. Julienne, John T. Kneebone, Brent Tarter, and Sandra Gioia Treadway, eds. * Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2006 * xxii, 700 pp. * $49.95
I spent the four days of Thanksgiving weekend 2006 reading 700 pages of Virginia biographies (Caperton to Daniels). I lost the weekend in the sense of other tasks, but I savored Virginia history. I doubt if many other Dictionary of Virginia Biography (DVE) readers will choose the cover-to-cover technique. But if they do, they will encounter a twentieth-century governor (John Nichols Dalton) and a seventeenthcentury deputy governor (Sir Thomas Dale); multiple members of the General Assembly, black and white, male and female; and a few state judges. More unusual subjects include Lucy Ann White Cox, a Confederate vivandière or daughter of the regiment; Fighting Dick Colley, a southwestern Virginia frontier character; Chauco, who warned the colonists of Opechancanough's plans to attack in 1622; Ann Pierce Parker Cowper, a principal in a nineteenth-century divorce; August Fletcher Crabtree, a "shipwright of miniatures"; and Francis Langhorne Dade, hero of the second Seminole War in Florida. Along the way there are lots of educators, a sprinkling of Native Americans, and many Baptists preachers.
As readers of this journal will know from the reviews of earlier volumes of the Dictionary (review of volume 1 by Thomas H. Appleton, Jr., in Vol. 108, no. 1 [2000], p. 85, and review of volume 2 by Mark F. Odintz in Vol. 110, no. 1 [2002], p. 98), the editors project twelve volumes containing approximately 6,000 biographies of Virginia men and women who "made significant contributions to the history or culture of their locality, state, or nation" (p. vi). Generally, the subject also lived "a...