Alexander B. Haskell. For God, King, and People

“Renaissance Virginia” does not at first glance seem to be a logical phrase. In the usual story of that troubled colony’s origins, Virginia’s planters, servants, and slaves had little time or inclination for art and philosophy. If there has been one key interpretive insight about Virginia over the years, it has been the centrality of economic motives in its conception—usually contrasted to the godly objectives of New England’s founders. In For God, King, and People, however, a new Virginia appears, one driven not so much by tobacco as by the quest to create a godly commonwealth. In Alexander B. Haskell’s formulation, a strongly Christian humanist ideal of political union animated the efforts to make the colony from the sixteenth century until well into the seventeenth, eventually losing out to a more centralized, hierarchical vision of empire after the Restoration. Vestiges of these founding principles remained, however, even in the new state’s eventual christening as the “Commonwealth of Virginia” after independence.

Archaeology · Commonwealth · Haskell · Humanism · Independence (probability theory) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Classics · European Political History Analysis · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies