Author James Thompson trained in Philosophy not History. In The Birth of Virginia’s Aristocracy, he presents a philosophical discussion on how society developed in 17th century Virginia. He begins by noting that the Virginia Company founded its new world colony with the intention of making money. He describes how social visionary Edmund Sandys attempted to save its faltering business by shifting the company’s focus from creating profits to creating a viable marketplace. Sandys undertook to do this, Thompson explains, by establishing a “commonwealth”. Sandys’ idea was to provide a market where private enterprisers could exchange the products of their industry. Sandys attracted industrious people by giving them free land and a community “parliament”. Thompson finds in Sandys experiment this fundamental lesson: unless a society provides it members a profit-generating market, it will fail. Sandys program did not save his company, but it did save its colony by making it a place where private enterprisers could profit. Thompson describes how the process of growing as a profit-generating marketplace snarled the commonwealth’s “civil society” in politics. He finds in this a second principle of society: as the cell grows it divides. In Virginia, growth produced a diversity of opportunities and problems. In 1619, diverging personal and economic interests led to a crossroad. Seeking a better way to manage its colony’s proliferating problems and conflicts, the Virginia Company’s London Council authorized its colonists to establish a local legislature where they could define their common good and make their laws. This caused politics to become an essential aspect of Virginia’s fledgling society. It quickly became a divisive force. An ominous turn occurred in 1660 when Governor Berkeley began packing the colony's legislature. This, says Thompson, produced the privileged, wealthy class remembered today as Virginia’s “aristocracy”.

The Birth of Virginia's Aristocracy

History

Thompson, James C.

Americas

Commonwealth Books of Virginia

While waiting anxiously for the Royal Navy to seal the Port of Boston on 1 June 1774, Sam Adams revised his political strategy. He scrapped the Patriotic Movement he had led during the previous decade. In its place he established an Independence Movement. No longer would American colonials seek to adjudicate their grievances against their British governors. Henceforward they would strive to sever the bands that tied them to England. This new political purpose required a new political logic. It was no longer practical to argue that Parliament was violating the constitutional rights of the king’s loyal American subjects. Sam and John Adams realized that the time had come to play their ace. The king was a tyrant, they now claimed, and he was violating the rights Nature’s author vested in all men to “life, liberty, and property.” Author James Thompson explains that when John Adams unveiled this claim in the First Continental Congress he roused a hornet’s nest of opposition. Sharply divided, the Congress refused to endorse the Bill of Rights in which Adams invoked colonial rights “by Nature”.  Thompson reconstructs the debate and provides the long-missing explanation for how Adams’ orphan Bill of Rights found its way into the Journal of the Congress, which it did after the Congress adjourned.

The Dubious Achievement of the First Continental Congress

Business & Money

Job Hunting & Careers

In "George Washington's Mulatto Man - Who was Billy Lee?", author James Thompson re-weaves a fabric of events that began more than twenty-five years before the Declaration of Independence was written and ended more than twenty-five years after its ratification. Most of these events are known only through passing comments, many of them George Washington's. Sketchy though the record is, it confirms that Washington had a unique relationship with the mulatto boy he bought in 1767 for 61.15£. What made this relationship special is not in the written record. Mr. Thompson unravels the mystery in his new book. The tie that bound Washington to Billy Lee remained unbroken through the last three decades of Washington's life. In his will, Washington freed "my mulatto man Billy" and bestowed upon him a lifetime annuity. What force forged this unique bond? Mr. Thompson discovered it, he says, by stepping beyond the boundaries that have limited previous deliberations on this curious matter: George Washington and Billy Lee were more than master and slave.	The written record says nothing of Billy Lee's parents apart from his being a mulatto. It shows, however, that George Washington knew Billy Lee's former owner. In fact, he knew all of Billy's former owners. The author contends that the future President also knew the boy's parents and that therein lay the reason he sailed to Cabin Creek, Westmoreland County, and purchased the seventeen year old maroon (and his brother) from his distant kinswoman, Mary Smith Ball Lee. Mr. Thompson completes his stunning commentary by unveiling a portrait of his subject. The picture was painted from life by one of the four artists who knew Billy Lee. Charles Willson Peale portrayed him where he always was, at his celebrated master's shoulder. Mr. Thompson's ingenious detective work shows readers how conspicuous facts become invisible when viewed through the wrong lens. His investigation confirms the qualities that made George Washington history's greatest man. It also changes our understanding about race in colonial America.

George Washington’s Mulatto Man: Who was Billy Lee ?

So many myths surround Pocahontas and Sacagawea that the fascinating true stories are often obscured. This book offers an original perspective on two of the best-known, least-understood women in American history, said Landon Y. Jones, author of William Clark and the Shaping of the American West, in an advance review. Pocahontas and Sacagawea brings the legacies of these famous women and their peoples up to the present. This rigorously researched work of nonfiction focuses on the personalities and adventures of the American west." Berck's groundbreaking book adds an important new dimension to the story of western migration and the European settlement of America. The nation-building set in motion in Jamestown, and accelerated by Lewis and Clark, led to terrible consequences for American Indians, Berck observed in a recent interview. Yet, not all of the interactions between whites and Indians were brutal. There appeared to be genuine friendships between Pocahontas and John Smith, and betw

Pocahontas and Sacagawea: Interwoven Legacies in American History

Biographies & Memoirs

Spindell Berck, Cyndi

Community & Culture

The inspiration of a group of Harvard Medical School undergraduates was the beginning of what was to become The Harvard Medical School of China in Shanghai. All, it seems, had received invitations form physicians practicing in China to locate a school of modern medicine there and were eager to join the venture. After many setbacks, in the course of time the school would occupy a large, handsome, two story structure generously offered by the Chinese Red Cross. It provided operating rooms, wards for twenty patients, lecture halls, laboratories, and administration suite, and a student dormitory. Though, by design the Harvard Medical Schools of China was limited to five years, from 1911 to 1916, it did in fact play a not inconsequential role in the introduction of modern medicine to ancient China. It was shortly after this new school opened its doors that my mother passed through them for her first interview with Dr. Carl Hedblom, the note thoracic surgeon, for whom she was to work as surgical nurse, and whom she idolized. It was the interview that was to change the course of her life. Arriving myself sometime not long after that, I did my best to notice how it was going, which I relate in this book.

Anastasia, Florence Nightingale, and I: A Nurse's Story

Wallace, Barbara Brooks

Memoirs

George Mason of Gunston Hall distinguished himself as a planter, revolutionary patriot, author the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and slave owner. He wrote “that all men are by nature equally free and…have certain inherent rights…” and argued simultaneously that slavery was “that slow Poison, which is daily contamination [to] the Minds &amp; Morals of our People.” Yet Mason owned more than a hundred slave men, women, and children himself. Over his lifetime he freed none of them. Among His Slaves explores the paradox of this important founding father who believed strongly in human rights and detested slavery, but ignored the legal opportunity to manumit slaves. It probes George Mason’s changing attitude on slavery during the American Revolutionary period. As early as 1765, more than a decade before he drafted for the Virginia Declaration of Rights, he declared slavery as “an Evil very pathetically described by the Roman Historians.” His statements grew ever more emphatic and vocal as time went on. Across more than two decades - from 1765 to 1788 - Mason became increasingly outspoken about his disdain of slavery. Referring to all masters of slaves as “Petty Tyrants,” he does not free any of the individuals he owned. His own spoken and written words do not match actions he could have taken to manumit his slaves. Why not? Among his Slaves uses plantation records and Mason family documents to tell the story of enslaved Africans and African Virginians who lived on George Mason’s Plantation, Gunston Hall. It provides new information never before published on his enslaved people and sheds light on why Mason did not manumit his slaves during his lifetime. This paradox demands discussion. The story is overdue.

Among His Slaves: George Mason's Struggle with Slavery

Dunn, Terry K.

Historical

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