The Backcountry Towns of Colonial Virginia. By Christopher E. Hendricks. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Pp. xxii, 186. $36.00, ISBN 978-1-57233-543-1.)
Christopher E. Hendricks's book is a good start on a big subject. That subject is not by necessity colonial, nor is it limited to the backcountry or even Virginia. But it is towns. Much scholarship has been expended on the early American South as a rural world: dispersed plantations punctuated only by colonial capitals or Atlantic ports such as Jamestown, Williamsburg, Annapolis, or Charlestown. The urban South has largely been a subject for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The South before cotton ...