| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia. By Warren M. Billings. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. xx, 290 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8071-3012-5.)
Toward the end of Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia, I noticed the absence of strong authorial judgments about Berkeley. Then, on the third-to-the-last page, almost as an afterword to readers who want a judgment on Berkeley, the governor of Virginia in 1676 during Bacon's rebellion, Warren M. Billings notes that Berkeley was and remains a controversial figure; too often people have tried to "gauge the character of the man rather than his significance as a figure in history" (p. 271).	1
Billings is of a generation schooled by teachers who believed that biographies provided bright young men examples of worthy public figures on which they might model themselves. Recent biographies on men such as George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton suggest a continuing audience for these books and that historians are willing to provide them. Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia, however, is a far cry from that kind of work, even though it exemplifies the best biographies: a highly readable narrative full of interesting details about Berkeley's professional and personal relationships, all carefully contextualized by the world in which he lived.	. . .

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