On the way home to Philadelphia I stopped by in Lexington to do some more research on pre-Civil War ideas about law and constitutionalism at Washington College (and here). The archives at Washington and Lee are fabulous; there's some great stuff in there, from the extensive records of the Graham and the Washington student literary societies to the trustees' papers. There's even a terrific sketchbook prepared by the daughter of the school's last antebellum present. Well, well worth the time spent there.
I'm almost done making my way through the literary society debates; they're proving to be an important comparison with those at UNC, Davidson, and Emory College. Perhaps understandably, the subjects and votes are more moderate than many of the more southern schools I work on. I hope to talk some more about this in the spring, about the topics they debated, and also some of the uses we can make of this for understanding the issues on the minds of educated Americans.
But right now I want to talk about a book I bought while I was on the W&L campus, Charles Bodie's Remarkable Rockbridge: The Story of Rockbridge County Virginia. It's a really terrific book -- beautifully produced -- that spans the county's history from the arrival of Native Americans through the early twenty-first century. One of the things that Bodie does really well is focus on race -- slavery and then Jim Crow -- in the county's history. He deals deftly with the lives of the enslaved and with the transition to freedom, with the integration of the student body at Washington and Lee and VMI and in the county schools, too. Of course there's a lot to work with in Rockingham -- from the conflict with natives and the American Revolution, to slavery and Civil War, then Reconstruction and the progressive era and great depression. There was manufacturing in Rockbridge before the Civil War, primarily iron furnaces, along with canal and railroad building. All of that wrapped up in a very, very beautiful setting, Remarkable Rockbridge is a model of how to write a county's history over centuries and to see the changes in our nation alongside.
I don't see the book on amazon yet, but it can be ordered from the Rockbridge Historical Society here.
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