Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, Vol. 1 (of 2)

John Fiske was a master storyteller among American historians, and this 1897 work demonstrates why. Rather than compiling dates and battles, he traces the deeper currents of causation - the forces that shaped Virginia from Raleigh's doomed dream of empire through the planter society that would birth a revolution. Fiske begins with England thrusting herself between Spain and France on the Atlantic seaboard, then follows how "Virginia" as a geographic and political concept evolved from a vast territory spanning Florida to Canada into something more specific and recognizable. By the time of Governor Dinwiddie and the French threat in 1753, the colony's character was fully formed. Fiske writes with literary grace about the collision of empires, the transformation of land and people, and the making of a distinctly American society. This is history as intellectual adventure, dense with insight for anyone who wants to understand not just what happened in colonial America, but why it happened that way.