| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

L. Scott Philyaw. Virginia's Western Visions: Political and Cultural Expansion on an Early American Frontier. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2004 Pp. xxvii, 180. $33.00.
This volume examines the evolving views of the West held by Virginia leaders from the opening of the colonial period through the early nineteenth century. According to L. Scott Philyaw, the Old Dominion's elite wavered between pessimistic visions of the West as a fearful, uncivilized, and uncontrollable place and optimistic expectations of vast economic resources and easy replication of the social and political values already enshrined in the East. The ideas of prominent Virginians on these subjects illuminate their changing beliefs about the future and about their place in their own society.	1
From virtually the beginning of their colony, leading Virginians recognized the importance of access to western lands for success in the tobacco economy. They also realized that hostile Native Americans, escaped slaves, and especially lower-class whites could threaten their control of this valuable region. By manipulating the processes of land surveying and sales and by creating local governments in the West that were dominated by officials already committed to eastern ways, provincial leaders avoided serious challenges to their hegemony for most of the colonial period. Unlike their peers in the conflict-ridden Carolinas, the Virginia gentry viewed the arrival of non-English European Protestants in frontier areas as a source of strength and confidently incorporated their leaders into the colony's structure of political and economic power. Working through the Ohio Company and other enterprises, the gentry planned for expansion beyond the Appalachians.	. . .

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