Virginia - K. M. Kostyal - Paperback

HISTORY History haunts Virginia like a lost lover. Images, mementos, whispers of the past float along her rivers, get tangled in the thick press of her forests, stand beside the too-gallant statues that posture in her courthouse squares. So much history, and so many of them. Native American and European, male and female, black and white. Every little borough has its own story, as does every long-standing Virginia family. It's fair to say that the first 250 years of this state's recorded history read like a saga filled with its own theatrics: heroes, devils, tragedies, comedies, victories, and defeats. After all, Virginians trace themselves back to the first colonists, to major players in the Revolution, to "founding fathers" of the new nation. And then the state was capital of the Confederacy and the primary battleground for the Civil War. For octogenarian Virginians -- and younger ones who cleave to the Commonwealth's past -- that war, regardless of its cost, was a moment of glory. Glory clearly tinges Virginia's past, sometimes to the Old Dominion's detriment. Virginians have had a deserved reputation for courting old traditions, for looking backward more often than forward. But that old-line conservatism seems itself to be receding into the past. While Virginia can't be counted as one of America's most progressive states, she has learned in recent decades to move forward, with the past as a sort of patina about her. She may not be an angel, but her charms are considerable. Fruitfullest Virginia Virginia's saga actually began somewhere in the vaguest past, when bands of nomads drifted out of Asia and into the area. When they reached the Atlantic they could drift no farther. And so they spread out along its tributaries, settled into the endless coastal forests, lived off the abundance of the land, slowly resolving themselves into tribes and kingdoms. We know little of their culture except that they were a prosperous people and members of the Algonquian language group. Then, in the sixteenth century another band of restless wanderers unceremoniously entered their world. These were, of course, the European explorers, intent on a kind of migration of their own, only in reverse of what the Asian nomads had done: They were pushing west toward the riches of the Indies -- until North America got in their way. In the 1560s, Spanish adventurers captured a native chief from the coast of what is now Virginia, named him Don Luis de Valasco, and brought him back to Madrid for an education. When Spanish Jesuits returned Don Luis to Virginia in 1570, he reasserted his rights as a chief, and the Jesuits built a mission hoping to convert the Indians to Christ. Instead, Don Luis dispatched the Jesuits to the Great Spirit. Little was heard from Europeans until aspiring English colonists bumped up upon the shore 37 years later. The Powhatan chief who watched them land was probably Don Luis's son, and by now leader of the combined Algonquian groups along the coast. The English, meanwhile, had moored their ships and named the area on which they'd landed after their beloved Elizabeth, the virgin queen. They called it Virginia. Jamestown Established The ships set sail carrying aspiring adventurers, plus the ships' crews. About half of the 105 colonists who survived the trip were the younger sons of gentry who had nothing to gain by staying in seventeenth-century England, where they would inherit neither land nor wealth. This exotic Virginia held the promise of untold riches and opportunity. That they would have to work for any of this seemed to have escaped them as they set sail with high hopes, few skills, and even less of the grit they would need to survive. The other half of the expediKostyal, Karen M. is the author of 'Virginia - K. M. Kostyal - Paperback' with ISBN 9781878867414 and ISBN 1878867415.