The Old Dominion State

A History of Virgina

A Sweeping History of the Great State of Virginia

From Jamestown's desperate beginnings to the removal of Richmond's Confederate monuments, The Old Dominion tells the epic story of America's most historically significant state—a place where the nation's highest ideals and deepest contradictions have always existed side by side.

Virginia gave America four of its first five presidents and the intellectual architecture of democracy itself. It also built its fortune on slavery, led the Confederacy, and resisted civil rights longer and more fiercely than almost any other state. This sweeping narrative traces Virginia's journey across four centuries, from the Powhatan Confederacy through colonial tobacco plantations, from revolutionary ferment to Civil War battlefields, from Harry Byrd's segregationist machine to twenty-first century transformation.

With vivid storytelling and unflinching honesty, this history explores how Virginia became both the "Mother of States and Statesmen" and the epicenter of American slavery, how the same soil produced Thomas Jefferson's words about human equality and the system that kept millions in bondage. It follows the state through rebellion and revolution, war and reconstruction, resistance and reluctant change, arriving finally at contemporary Virginia—a state wrestling with its Confederate legacy while evolving into something entirely new.

The Old Dominion is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not just Virginia, but America itself—because Virginia's story, in all its glory and shame, is the American story in its most concentrated and revealing form.