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After decades of research on Middlesex County, Virginia, and careful analysis of data on over 12,000 people who lived there between the 1660s and the 1740s, Darrett and Anita Rutman published this provocative study, which challenged conventional scholarly wisdom about colonial Virginia. Historians like Edmund Morgan and T.H. Breen had characterized early Virginia as a privatized, de-institutionalized society dominated by independent plantations. The Rutmans demonstrated that in one significant p...
White settlers in seventeenth-century Virginia created proto-neighborhoods, coming together for economic and political activity when they attended church or visited a town’s retail center. Authors Darrett and Anita Rutman have shown that, from a twentieth-century social scientist’s perspective, a community did exist in Middlesex County, contrary to colonial writers, referenced in the book’s introduction, who fretted about a lack of community. The creation of a slaveholding planter elite ruptured...