| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In Old Virginia: Slavery, Farming, and Society in the Journal of John Walker. By Claudia L. Bushman. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xx, 292 pp. $42.50,ISBN 0-8018-6725-8.)

Areas in relative decline seldom capture the attention of historians, who generally prefer to chronicle regions during their periods of ascent, during their wills to power, as it were. There are, for example, many works on the South Carolina low country in the colonial and early national periods but few on the area in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Similarly, there are numerous scholarly studies on Chicago during the 1850–1920 period but far fewer relating to the city during the period between, say, 1930 and 1950 or the period between 1970 and 1990. Tidewater Virginia during the antebellum period offers another case of relative decline. This area, too, has suffered from scholarly neglect over the years, which makes Claudia L. Bushman's In Old Virginia welcome indeed.

Not that Bushman is concerned primarily with the Tidewater as a whole. Rather, In Old Virginia was explicitly designed as a detailed microhistory of one Tidewater farmer, John Walker of King and Queen County, during the antebellum period. Although some readers may wish to draw generalizations from Bushman's study, she is clearly most interested in capturing in full the life history of one small planter along the Mattaponi River.

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