| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley. By Warren R. Hofstra (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xv plus 410 pp. $49.95).

The Shenandoah Valley was rich with towns by 1800, unlike the rest of Virginia. In this carefully researched study, Warren R. Hofstra asks why. As he explores the Valley's transformation from frontier to settled world, the author masterfully builds a "braided narrative of contingent events" to explain the development of the region's distinctive landscape of dispersed, enclosed farms producing for national and international markets, but with goods and services exchanged in towns (331). This same transformation was replicated more quickly on new frontiers further west, with a similar spatial organization eventually defining the multiple "Main Street" towns of the American midlands. The Valley's distinctive hierarchy of interlinked towns, crossroads hamlets, and dispersed farms woven into earlier open- country neighborhoods was what historical geographer Robert D. Mitchell has called a "settlement continuum." Yet, as Hofstra demonstrates, the settlement story here was not just confined to the Shenandoah Valley, and did not just express the imprint of its immediate occupiers. Strategic considerations and distant decisions of those in power also played a part. This is a story that is conceived on a grand scale, one that embraces the entire Atlantic world, and one that examines this layered regional landscape through both a magnifying glass and a telescope.

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