The old South;: The founding of American civilization,
(Studies the origins of the people who came to the souther...)
Studies the origins of the people who came to the southern colonies and the emergence of this new society.How American civilization differed from anything in Europe. It is seldom that a book on colonial history breaks new ground as effectively as this. Altogether a richly, entertaining and instructive book. Illustrated with 43 full-page plates of Souther mansions, landscapes, historic buildings, shops and tools. Great book for collector of information on the old south. Fast shipping
(Bacon's Rebellion, 1676 is presented here in a high quali...)
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Patrician and Plebian in Virginia: Or, the Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion
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Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker was a leading American historian and Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University.
Background
Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker was born in Charlottesville, Va. , the son of Charles Christian Wertenbaker, a landholder and cigar manufacturer, and Frances Thomas Leftwich. The Wertenbakers came from unpretentious Huguenot and German origins. In America, Wertenbaker men often married Englishwomen of higher social status. Wertenbaker's paternal grandfather, William, was appointed by Thomas Jefferson in 1826 as secretary to the faculty and first librarian of the University of Virginia, an institution he served for more than fifty years before he died in 1882. He also unfurled one of the first Confederate flags in Charlottesville on March 23, 1861, weeks before Virginia seceded, and he bequeathed to his descendants a store of anecdotes about Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and other great men of the early Republic, all of whem he knew personally.
Education
Wertenbaker's father, a Confederate veteran, sent his sons to the University of Virginia. The family ambience is subtly portrayed in To My Father (1936), the autobiographical novel of Wertenbaker's nephew Charles, in which Thomas appears briefly as "Uncle Paul. " Wertenbaker read Edward Gibbon through at thirteen and attended local public schools, the Jones' University School, and Charlottesville Public High School. He entered the University of Virginia in 1896 and interrupted his studies to teach for a year at St. Matthew's School in Dobbs Ferry, N. Y. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, receiving both his B. A. and M. A. degrees in 1902. He then served briefly as editor of the Charlottesville Morning News and the Baltimore News before enrolling as a doctoral student at the University of Virginia in 1906. He supported himself as associate professor of history and economics at the Agricultural and Mechanical College at Texas (1907 - 1909) and then as an instructor in American history at the University of Virginia (1909 - 1910) until he received his Ph. D. in 1910.
Career
He published, at his own expense, his dissertation, Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia; or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion. This study, which powerfully challenged the romantic myth of the cavalier origins of Virginia's great planter dynasties, advanced a new methodology for understanding the social history of colonial America. He later improved this technique through a sophisticated use of rent rolls, tax lists, and headright records. Wertenbaker's reputation attracted the attention of Woodrow Wilson, who was then president of Princeton and was campaigning for the governorship of New Jersey; Wilson persuaded him to move to Princeton in 1910. From 1917 to 1923, Wertenbaker earned supplementary income as a member of the editorial staff of the New York Evening Sun. Wertenbaker rose through the ranks at Princeton - assistant professor of history in 1914, associate in 1921, and Edwards Professor of History from 1925 until his retirement in 1947. From 1928 to 1936 he served as department chairman. Always a popular lecturer both on campus and off, he also played a role in building the doctoral program of his department, mostly through the appointments that he encouraged. Wertenbaker's national and international reputation grew as he published a steadily growing number of important books over nearly half a century. Virginia Under the Stuarts (1914) and The Planters of Colonial Virginia (1922) further developed his argument that seventeenth-century Virginia offered liberty and great opportunity to small planters until the Navigation Acts and the growth of slavery created a much less open society. His textbook The American People: A History (1926) did not romanticize the slave regime, showed sympathy for Confederate men and motives even though he considered "their task almost hopeless from the start, " shared the prevailing white view that Reconstruction had been a carnival of misrule and corruption, but explicitly refused to blame the freedmen for these problems. His book The First Americans, 1607-1690 (1927) was one of the earliest volumes to be completed for the innovative series A History of American Life, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. , and Dixon Ryan Fox. In Norfolk: Historic Southern Port (1931), he tried to rescue local history from "the antiquarian and the genealogist, " while Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon's Rebellion and Its Leader (1940) returned to his first love, the seventeenth-century Virginia rebel who, he believed, came closer than anyone else to anticipating Jeffersonian values. These accomplishments won Wertenbaker a high degree of recognition. In 1931 he taught at the University of Göttingen, where he saw something of the rise of Nazism. Oxford University named him Harmsworth Professor in 1939, but he could not go to England because of the outbreak of World War II. After delivering the Anson G. Phelps Lectures at New York University in 1942 (published in that year as The Golden Age of Colonial Culture), he finally got to England and the Harmsworth Professorship in 1944-1945. By then, he was beginning to receive honorary degrees almost every year, and in 1947 he served as president of the American Historical Association. During this period he became active in organizing the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va. After his 1947 retirement, he taught briefly at the University of Delaware, Emory University, the University of Virginia, and Hampden-Sydney College, but his most important stint was at the University of Munich (1950 - 1951), where he helped to organize American-civilization programs throughout the German Federal Republic. Wertenbaker's publications continued into the 1950's. Between 1938 and 1947 he completed an impressive trilogy on each of the regions that contributed to the Founding of American Civilization series: The Middle Colonies (1938), The Old South (1942), and The Puritan Oligarchy (1947). The first volume was the most innovative of the three, with its broad emphasis on pluralism and cultural diversity as essential American traits, themes also reflected in Father Knickerbocker Rebels: New York City During the Revolution (1948). His New England volume was less forgiving than the others. He shared none of Perry Miller's fascination with the severe ambiguities at the core of the Puritan mind; in Wertenbaker's judgment, New Englanders before 1700 contributed little of significance to the triumph of liberty in America. His presidential address to the American Historical Association argued that no one could make sense of the Midwest without seeing it as a crucible that brought together and transformed each of these colonial subcultures. He also produced an excellent history of higher education, Princeton, 1746-1896 (1946), for the university's bicentennial. His last studies, particularly Bacon's Rebellion: 1676 (1957) and Give Me Liberty: The Struggle for Self-Government in Virginia (1958), reveal some of the defensiveness of a man who realized that his own profession was beginning to destroy what he held most sacred. By then, his Princeton successor, Wesley Frank Craven; Wilcomb Washburn; and Bernard Bailyn were all challenging Nathaniel Bacon's place in the history of American liberty. Wertenbaker wrote vigorous, graphic prose. An unashamed advocate of the Whig interpretation of history, he celebrated the triumph of liberty in Anglo-America and deplored its tardy arrival in militaristic Germany. His best writing drew from his richly diverse family heritage to broader American themes and revealed him as a Virginian convinced that his state had done more than any other to establish the nation's democratic tradition, a southerner committed to the superiority of free labor over any slave system, an American rooted in his multiethnic past, and a Protestant suspicious of any denomination's claim to possess final truth. Wertenbaker took seriously the civic responsibilities of a prominent historian. Despite a flirtation with the neutrality movement of the 1930's, which in turn may well reveal second thoughts about Wilson's intervention in 1917, he ardently supported America's efforts in both world wars. "Great Britain, " he declared, "was the United States' first line of defense. " Yet, he retained his ancestral sympathy for Germany and believed by 1950 that the fates of America and West Germany were inextricably intertwined. He hoped he could persuade Germans to study serious American texts before Hollywood and pulp fiction misled them completely. He died in Princeton.
Achievements
He was a leading American historian and Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. A talented amateur architect, he designed the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity House at the University of Virginia and his home, Thoroughgood, in Princeton.
Wertenbaker was spare, erect, and somewhat angular. His voice, his nephew observed, "was gentle and he laughed a lot, but when he laughed he never made a sound, just opened his mouth wide and wrinkled up his eyes. " Close Princeton friends and many students called him "the Colonel, " a reflection of his refined southern manners.
Connections
On July 10, 1916, Wertenbaker married Sarah Rossetter Marshall of Lexington, Ky. ; they had one child.
