Jamestown - Bibliography

by Mehnaz Ara Choudhury (January 2004) and Edward J. Gallagher (May 2006)

Appelbaum, Robert, and John Wood Street, eds.  Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005.

Anthology containing a dozen essays divided into sections looking inward to relationships among settlers, Indians, and the London Virginia Company; outward to English relations on the "world stage"; and on the "metamorphosis" of English and Indian visions over time.  Essays on conquest, Indians abroad, Spain, Ireland, Smith, Frethorne, Behn, slavery, land use, etc.

Barbour, Philip L.  The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606-1609.   2 vols.  Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1969.

Comprehensive collection of documents relating to the foundation of Jamestown and the history of the Jamestown colony up to the departure of Captain John Smith early in October 1609.  Along with Billings, Brown, Haile, Kingsbury, Neill, Quinn, Robinson, Tyler, and Virtual Jamestown, one of the important places to go for primary material.

---, ed.  The Complete Works of Captain John Smith.  3 Vols.  Chapel  Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1986.

The place to go for the writings of the one person most associated with the founding of Jamestown.

Bemiss, Samuel M., ed.  The Three Charters of the Virginia Company of London: With Seven Related Documents; 1606-1621.  Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 4.  Williamsburg: The Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957.

Contains the charters issued by the Virginia Company to the founders of Jamestown, as well as the Virginia Council’s “Instructions” to Sir Thomas Gates, Sir Thomas West, and Sir George Yeardley.

Billings, Warren, ed.  The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975.

A collection of 17th-Century Virginia documentary source materials with brief introductory essays that serve as an introduction to Virginia’s colonial history.  Billings divides over two hundred documents into several categories including early settlement, “the evolution of self government,” “the structure of society,” slavery and the first Africans, as well as the conflict between Indians and Whites.  Along with Barbour, Brown, Haile, Kingsbury, Neill, Quinn, Robinson, Tyler, and Virtual Jamestown, one of the important places to go for primary material. 

Bridenbaugh, Carl.  Jamestown, 1544-1699.  New York: Oxford UP, 1980.

Topical rather than chronological organization, though most often chronological within the topics: the English "invasion," Opechancanough and Powhatan, Rolfe and Pocahontas, life and death, God and man, self-government and self-interest, Bacon's uprising, the failure of the community, Jamestown as symbol.

Brown, Alexander.  The Genesis of the United States.  2 vols.  1890.  New York: Russell & Russell, 1964.

Chronological collection of 360 documents from 1605-1616 divided into periods, with brief biographies of the leading figures.  Along with Barbour, Billings, Haile, Kingsbury, Neill, Quinn, Robinson, Tyler, and Virtual Jamestown, one of the important places to go for primary material.

Craven, Wesley Frank.  Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment.  New York: Oxford UP, 1932.

Seems to still be the classic scholarly treatment of the company during the contentions between the Sandys group and the Smith group in the tag end of the Company's existence, 1618-1624.

---.  "Indian Policy in Early Virginia."  William and Mary Quarterly 3rd Series, 1. 1 (1944): 65-82.

Survey of such policy into the 1660's tracing a 4-fold movement: working with the Indians, treating the Indians as subjects giving tribute, missionary and educative work symbolized by the plans for a college for Indian children, complete breakdown occasioned by the massacre of 1622.

---.  The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689.  Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1949.  60-182. 

Chapters on the history of the colony into the 1640s, with specific sections on Jamestown and the London Company.

---.  The Virginia Company of London, 1606-1624.  Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 5.  Williamsburg: The Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957.

Pamphlet-length history of the Company (cf. his book-length study above) that concludes: "Here were men who out of their disappointment quarreled bitterly and by their quarrels helped to destroy an agency through which in the past they had worked together, with a remarkable devotion to the public interest, for the achievement of great objectives.  No doubt, their greatest fault had been to set their goals too high.  Certainly yheir greatest virtue was persistence in the faith that great things could be done for England in America, a faith destined in time to be justified by the course of history."

Fausz, J. Frederick.  "An 'Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides': England's First Indian War, 1609-1614."  Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 98.1 (1990): 3-54.

Details battles during this five-year middle period under the Virginia Company's second charter.  "My thesis is that intercultural hostilities between August 1609 and April 1614 constituted the First Anglo-Powhatan War, because their acknowledged purpose and systematic pattern -- as recognized by the combatants themselves -- were distinctly different from the sporadic violence that preceded 1609 and followed 1614."

Feest, Christian F.  "Virginia Algonquians."  Northeast.  Ed. Bruce G. Trigger.  Volume 15 of Handbook of North American Indians.  Gen. ed. William C. Sturtevant.  Washington: Smithsonian, 1978.  253-70.

Valuable for anthropological information on the Powhatans: topics like territory, language, subsistence, material culture, tribal history.

Fitzmaurice, Andrew.  "The Moral Philosophy of Jacobean Colonisation."  Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500-1625.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.  58-101 [58-92 on Virginia].

Because of previous colonization failures, "The Virginia Company promoters never presented profit as the principal motivation for colonising. . . . While still employing the language of Ciceronian moral philosophy, they augmented the argument of honour and diminished profit and expedience. . . . The promoters of Jacobean colonies were increasingly deeply committed to a neo-Roman and quasi-republican scepticism of profit as a threat to the pursuit of civic action.  They were committed, accordingly, to the primacy of virtue as the motive and guide for political life."  Includes almost all of the usual suspects.

Fuller, Mary.  "Mastering Words: The Jamestown Colonists and John Smith."  Voyages in Print: English Travel to America 1576-1624.  London: Cambridge UP, 1995.  85-140.

Fuller's study covers important  promotional literature published in London in the 16th and 17th centuries, including the works of Gilbert, Raleigh, John Smith, and Richard Hakluyt.  Much like Peter Mancall, Fuller argues that the promotional literature was published for a skeptical government, and their detailed accounts of heroism and discovery were often embellished in an effort to recuperate failures or setbacks experienced by the colonists such as the disappearance of Roanoke or the "starving time" at Jamestown.  Fuller discusses how these works were received by readers in the Victorian era as examples of British mastery in the colonial endeavor and would fuel future imperial projects.

Haile, Edward Wright, ed.  Jamestown Narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony.  Virginia: Roundhouse, 1998.

Focuses on the years 1607-1617 and features selections from many writers, including Hamor, Strachey, Smith, Wingfield, Percy, and Dale.  Along with Barbour, Billings, Brown, Kingsbury, Neill, Quinn, Robinson, Tyler, and Virtual Jamestown, one of the important places to go for primary material.

Hatch, Charles E.  The First Seventeen Years: Virginia, 1607-1624.  Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 6.  Williamsburg: The Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957.

The first thirty-four pages provide a handy brief survey of events.  Good place to quickly locate what was happening when.

Horn, James.  "The Conquest of Eden: Possession and Dominion in Early Virginia."  Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World.  Ed. Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005.  25-48.

"The descent into violence that characterizes relations at Roanoke and in the Chesapeake was not just the inevitable outcome of English aggression toward peoples they considered culturally inferior, a consequence of the breakdown of trade, or an expression of the Indians' defensive reactions to European invaders.  Negotiations and eventual hostilities were structured on both sides by a powerful sense of territory and sovereignty."  The English could not transfer allegiance to an Indian king; no Indian could accept the sovereignty of an English monarch.  "A bloody struggle for possession was inevitable."

---.  A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America.  New York : Basic Books, 2005.

The most recent history of Jamestown from the generation before 1607 through the massacre and the dissolution of the Virginia Company.  Horn sees both that "representative government . . . would in time blossom into a vibrant political culture" but also "the appalling consequences of European colonization for Indian peoples and enslaved Africans."

Jamestown Rediscovery.  Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.  2002.  2 Feb. 2006.   <https://www.apva.org/jr.html>.

Jamestown Rediscovery is investigating the remains of 1607-1698 Jamestown on the APVA property on Jamestown Island, Virginia.

Jamestown Rediscovery: A World Uncovered.  Produced by Cinebar Productions,  Inc.  A&E Television Networks and the History Channel.  2001.

A video documentary of the many archaeological digs at the site of present-day Jamestown conducted by the Association for Virginia’s Antiquities Foundation.  See the above entry.

Juricek, John T.  "English Territorial Claims in North America under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts."  Terrae Incognitae 7 (1975): 7-22.

Investigates how, what, and why the English actually claimed: "Between 1609 and 1620 the English gradually abandoned the dominative code of territorial appropriation and embraced instead the central doctrines of the once-despised pre-emptive mode."  Interesting reference to the way Psalm 72 shows up in the promotional and justification works.

Kimmey, Fred M.  "Christianity and Indian Lands."  Ethnohistory 7.1 (1960): 44-60.

"Simply to assign economic drive -- conscious or unconscious -- as the single determining factor for an injustice which needed justification is to minimize other influences at work. . . . Political, religious and economic motives all played their part in the expansion acrosss the Atlantic."  Johnson, Symonds, Crashaw, Gray, Price, the "Declaration."

Kingsbury, Susan Myra, ed.  The Records of the Virginia Company of London.   4 vols.  Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1906-35. <https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser8.html#pub>

Online in the Thomas Jefferson Papers, American Memory Collection, Library of Congress. See the index at the end of volume 2 for handy access to the first volumes.  Along with Barbour, Billings, Brown, Haile, Neill, Quinn, Robinson, Tyler, and Virtual Jamestown, one of the important places to go for primary material.

Kiracofe, David James.  "The Jamestown Jubilees: 'State Patriotism' and Virginia Identity in the Early Nineteenth Century."  Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 110.1 (2002): 35-68.

"This essay examines the four public festivities [1807, 1822, 1834, 1857] held to celebrate the anniversary of the Jamestown landing as a means of understanding Virginia's cultural and political identity in the early nineteenth century.

Lefler, Hugh. T.  "Promotional Literature of the Southern Colonies."  Journal of Southern History 33 (1967): 3-25.

Surveys, though not exhaustively, Virginia promotional literature before it "came to an abrupt halt" after the massacre and the dissolution of the Virginia Company.  "Virginia had the largest amount, the widest variety, the most exaggerated, and perhaps the most effective of the promotional tracts of any colony. . . . The Virginia publicity was similar in some respects to that of later Southern colonies, but there were many dissimilarities."   The Declarations, Price, Crashaw, Johnson, Whitaker, Hamor, Waterhouse, Copland, Donne.

Mackenthun, Gesa.  "'A Mortall Immortall Possession': Virginian Battlefields."  Metaphors of Dispossession: American Beginnings and the Translation of Empire, 1492-1637.  Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1997.  193-264.

Discussions of Gray, Smith, Strachey, Purchas, Powhatan, the trope of the treacherous Indian, and critical readings by Perry Miller, Myra Jehlen, D.B. Quinn.

Mancall, Peter C., ed.  Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of  North America, 1580-1640.  Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press,  1995.

Mancall’s textbook anthology challenges notions that the English only wanted glory and gold from their attempts to colonize the New World – many who were risking their lives by traveling overseas were doing so to avoid a hostile political, religious, and social climate in England.  The impulse to create a new Eden must be understood as pleas to a government not interested in overseas settlement.  Of direct releveance to Jamestown are selections from Percy and A True Declaration of the Estate (1610).

McCary, Ben C.  Indians in Seventeenth-Century Virginia.  Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 18.  Williamsburg: The Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957.

McCary discusses the history and culture of the Indians located in the Virginia colony.  Useful for describing the daily lives of the Indians in Virginia.

Miller, Perry.  "Religion and Society in the Early Literature of Virginia."  Errand into the Wilderness.  New York: Harper, 1964.  99-140.  [originally published in the William and Mary Quarterly 5 (1948): 492-522 and 6 (1949): 24-41]

Contrary to entrenched belief, the settlement of Virginia was not "a mercantile adventure, a purely business proposition."  Religion was "the really energizing propulsion in this settlement, as in others."  It was the dissolution of the Virginia Company in 1624 that "changed Virginia from a holy experiment to a commercial plantation."  Draws upon Crashaw, Whitaker, Johnson, Donne, Purchas, and others.

Nash, Gary B.  "The Image of the Indian in the Southern Colonial Mind."  The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romaticism.  Ed. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak.  Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1972.  55-86.

"The changing image of the native inhabitants of North America provides a penetrating glimpse into the fears, desires, and intentions of Englishmen in colonial America.  From the guileless primitive of certain sixteenth-century writers, to the savage beast of colonial frontiersman, to the Noble Savage of eighteenth-century social critics . . . . the image of the Indian was molded by the nature of colonization and the inner requirements of adventuring Englishmen."  Purchas, Stratchey, Smith, Whitaker, Gray, Waterhouse.

Neill, Edward D.  History of the Virginia Company of London.  Albany: J. Munsell, 1869. Woven into a chronological historical essay are documents and selections of documents up through the dissolution of the Virginia Company. 

Along with Barbour, Billings, Brown, Haile, Kingsbury, Quinn, Robinson, Tyler, and Virtual Jamestown, one of the important places to go for primary material.

Oberg, Michael Leroy.  " Master Stockam's Opinion."  Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585-1685.  Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.  48-80.

"The metropolitan program of dominion and civility rested at its core upon the ability of officials to govern the Anglo-Amerocan frontier effectively,  The Jamestown experience between 1602 and 1625 reveals the fragility of that vision.  Both from London and in Virginia, metropolitan-minded men had tried to impose their plans for a Christian, Anglo-American New World empire upon a frontier where the actual colonists were more interested in planting tobacco on Indian land.  The metropolitans could not pursue their plans to improve the Indians without controlling the frontier population.  But this population continually pressed upon the Indian land, alienated the Powhatan Indians, undermined the philanthropic program of conversion and assimilation advanced by George Thorpe, and ultimately provoked a violent Indian uprising that destroyed the metropolitan program of the Virginia Company of London."  Johnson, Gray, Crashaw, Stratchey.

Old Dominion Society of the City of New York.  First Celebration of the Anniversary of the Settlement at Jamestown, Va., on the 13th of May, 1607. Hon. George W. Summers, orator.  New York, 1860.

Program of the festivities.

Pagden, Anthony.  Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain  and France, c. 1500-1800.  New Haven: Yale UP,  1995.

Pagden explores the motivations behind England’s colonial endeavor, and his project is unique because it outlines the evolution of early European philosophy regarding colonial subjects and rulers.  For Jamestown scholars, chapter three titled “Conquest and Settlement” is an important section for review.  Pagden traces the language of warfare and aristocratic values in the promotional literature of the day.  Pagden also argues that the motives behind Spanish exploration and English exploration were not different and fueled by similar economic motives: Spain’s concern was “the extraction of precious metals” and the English were more concerned with “commerce and agriculture” (66-67).

Parker, John.  "Preachers and Planters."  Books to Build an Empire.  Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965.  192-216.

After the unsuccessful first two years, "more than political reorganization was needed to revitalize Virginia, a sense of purpose, an enthusiasm for something other than immediate profits was required."  In 1609 "a restless group of visionaries . . . brought the emotional potential of religion into expressions of imperialistic ambition."  Symonds, Johnson, Price, Gray, Whitaker, Hamor, the "Declarations."

---.  "Religion and the Virginia Colony, 1609-10."  The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America 1480-1650.  Eds. K.R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny and P.E.H. Hair.  Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1979.  245-70.

"This would not appear to be a nation ready to set out to colonize, from a missionary motive. . . . Yet the propaganda of 1609-10 sought to rouse England to such an effort in Virginia, and by building a missionary motive into a commercial company, uttered the first serious proposal to carry England's religion to a non-Christian people abroad."  But the church was a weak link; it did not have the means to build a "missionary empire abroad: "even in 1620 the colony had only five clergymen."  Draws on Johnson, Crakanthorpe, Gray, Symonds, Tynley, Benson, Price, the two "Declarations" of 1610, Crashaw, Whitaker.

Pennington, Loren E.  “The Amerindian in English Promotional Literature 1575- 1625.”  The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America 1480-1650.  Eds. K.R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny and P.E.H. Hair.  Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1979.  175-94.

With its reorganization in 1609, the Virginia Company "maintained the optimistic view of the Amerindian as one of its most useful propaganda assets."  In the works of Symonds, Gray, Crashaw, Whitaker, the Indian may be barbarian, but "he was not ignorant, inhumane, or bestial."  That all changed with the massacre in 1622, and Waterhouse represents a complete reversal in policy, making the Indian "the chief scapegoat for all the difficulties of the colony."

Porter, H.C.  The Inconstant Savage: England and the North American Indian 1500-1660.  London: Duckworth, 1979.

Begins with Columbus and slowly and carefully follows England's engagement with the New World chronologically into the 1680's with specific reference to and liberal quoting from primary documents. Separate chapters on Strachey, Crashaw, and Whitaker, and one combining six authors who promoted the second charter (Johnson, Gray, Symonds, Crakanthorpe, Price, Benson).  Valuable both for an overall map and overview of the subject as well as pointers to the primary material to use for further study.

Price, David A.  Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of A New Nation.  New York: Albert A. Knopf, 2003.

Price’s exciting narrative focuses on the struggles and tribulations of what would become the first permanent English settlement in the U.S.  The book is based on countless documents -- letters, charters, and pamphlets -- and gives us a balanced view of the relationship between natives and colonists.  Price focuses heavily on the Pocahontas and John Smith relationship, and his description of Powhatan’s leadership is the most engaging description of the ruler.  The caution is that Price is a journalist not a scholar.

Quinn, David, ed.  New American World: A Documentary History of North America to  1612.  5 vols.  New York: Arno Press, 1979.

Volumes three and five contain specific documents related to the establishment of Roanoke and Jamestown, including Smith, Hamor, Strachey, Gilbert, and others.  Along with Barbour, Billings, Brown, Haile, Kingsbury, Neill, Robinson, Tyler, and Virtual Jamestown, one of the important places to go for primary material.

Robinson, W. Stitt.  Mother Earth: Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699.  Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 12.  Williamsburg: The Virginia 350th Anniversary Celebration Corporation, 1957.

Robinson discusses the desire for land as a major motivating factor of English colonization and how this would clash with those who had already settled in Jamestown, the Algonquin population of Virginia.  Covers major figures from Sir Walter Raleigh to William Claiborne but largely focuses on the ways in which individual colonists could be granted land rights (mostly through doing special favors for members of the Virginia Company).

---, ed.  Virginia Treaties, 1607-1722.  Vol 4 of Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607-1789.  Gen. Ed. Alden T. Vaughan.  Frederick: University Publications of America, 1983.

Along with Barbour, Billings, Brown, Haile, Kingsbury, Neill, Quinn, Tyler, and Virtual Jamestown, one of the important places to go for primary material.

Rountree, Helen C.  Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown.  Charlottesville : U of Virginia P, 2005.

An anthropologist, probably the foremost scholarly expert on the Powhatans, attempts "to write about Jamestown from the native perspective."  A history of the English-Indians relations and "biographies" of the three title figures.

---.  Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries.  Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1990.

In this and the following book, an anthropologist, probably the foremost scholarly expert on the Powhatans, engages in the "reconstruction of Powhatan culture and history." This volume comes up to the present.

---.  The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture.  Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1989.

An "historical ethnography" by an anthropologist, the leading scholar on the Powhatans, that seeks to "explain Indian behavior in the first century and a half of colonial Virginia history."  A companion to the above volume.

Rouse, Parke.  Virginia: A Pictoral History.   New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975.

The early history section includes photographs of the first stretches of Virginia’s coastland sighted by the Jamestown colonists; sketches of the Indians from early documents; maps and pictures from the Nova Britannia and John Smith publications; photographs of archeological finds from the James Fort; photos of some of the major surviving structures from the Jamestown area; pictures related to the tobacco trade, and many of DeBry’s early lithographs.

Scanlan, Thomas.  "Preaching the Nation: The Sermon as Promotion."  Colonial Writing and the New World 1583-1671: Allegories of  Desire.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1999.  93-123.

Gray, Symonds, Crashaw, Whitaker, and Donne attempt "to discover a means by which the English can re-imagine themselves as a Protestant nation."  The sermons "share four crucial characteristics that confirm their participation in the discourse of 'nation-ness'. . . . a narrative of loss as a means of describing the current state of the nation. . . . a general antipathy, or even hostility, to the colonial project within England. . . . the need to defer or regulate desire. . . . all confirm that the conversion of native populations will be the central signifying feature."

Seed, Patricia.  "Houses, Gardens, and Fences: Signs of English Possession in the New World."  Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New  World, 1492-1640.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.  16-40.

Seed "explores the array of ceremonies that Europeans performed to enact their  taking possession of the New World."   "Accounts of English occupation of the New World usually begin by describing ordinary house-building activity."  The English constructed their right to occupy the New World on "building houses and fences and planting gardens."  "The action of the colonists in the New World was planting"; the colonies were "plantations."  "Planting the garden was an act of taking possession . . . . It was not a law that entitled Englishmen to possess the New World, it was an action which established their rights."

Shammas, Carole.  "English Commercial Development and American Colonization."  The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic and America 1480-1650.  Eds. K.R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny and P.E.H. Hair.  Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1979.  151-74.

"In the Elizabethan period [emigrants] had left England hoping for some sort of conquest which would bring them easy wealth."  In the Jacobean period "rags to riches" stories, however exaggerated or untypical, helped to attract new people.  Traces the "commercializing of colonization."  Gray, Johnson, Crashaw, Whitaker, the "Declarations" are mentioned in passing.

Sheehan, Bernard W.  Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia.  Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980.

Sheehan discusses the discourse of civility and savagism as it evolved from the sixteenth century into the seventeenth, and its influence on the English colonial endeavors, especially Jamestown.  "The myth, of course, preceded the experience.  Europeans knew what they would find in the New World long before experience had an opportunity to intrude on their convictions.  They encountered savages in American because their minds and their senses had been molded by a powerful mythic formula that equated societies less elaborately organized than their own wit the primal condition. . . .  The massacre of 1622 marked no decisive turning point in Anglo-Indian relations, unless it was that the English, after the massacre, felt free to do forcibly what they had long wished to accomplish peacefully.  They sought the obliteration of savagism."  Chapters on "Paradise," "Ignoble Savagism," "Bestiality," "Conversion," and "Massacre."

Skura, Meredith Anne.  “Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest. ” Shakespeare Quarterly 40:1 (1989): 42-69.

Skura challenges readings of Prospero as “an exemplar of timeless human values” and discusses the new historicist readings of the character and the play as a critique of colonialism and England’s imperial values.

Sokol, B. J., and Mary Sokol.  "The Tempest and Legal Justification of Plantation in Virginia." Shakespeare Yearbook 7 (1996): 353-80.

"The quest of English culture for a moral and legal framework for its new Virginia enterprise thus inspired works of art.  Among these The Tempest  touches, sometimes with irony, all four vertices of the unstable quadrilateral underpinning of the contemporary drive to expand Westward."  Proposes the influence on Shakespeare of not only Strachey but the two 1610 "Declarations" from the Virginia Company, and talks at length of William Crashawe's sermon and Calvin's Case in framing the justification context for the play. 

Sweet, Timothy.  American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature.  Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2002.

Sweet explores the “American environmental consciousness,” outlining how European settlers related to the new land in the New World.  In Chapter 2, Sweet focuses on several examples of promotional literature, especially John Smith’s The General Historie of Virginia.  Smith would write of the tensions created by the colonist’s right to cultivation and the reality of their efforts—which vacillated between complete failures (Jamestown failing to raise enough crops to prevent starvation) or complete damage to the land itself (Jamestown’s tobacco crop would stress the soil, wasting the land for future farming efforts).  Using these documents, Sweet describes the struggle between individualist colonial impulses for the “New World’s potential productivity” (31) and the more “refined” and responsible “sense of environmental capacities"; the latter clearly contradicting the basic tenets of England’s imperialist philosophy.

Texts of Imagination and Empire: The Founding of Jamestown in Its Atlantic Context.  Folger Institute.  2000.  2 Feb. 2006.  <https://www.folger.edu/html/folger_institute/ jamestown-new/ index_main.htm>.

The 2000 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at the Folger "sought to place Jamestown in the context of all the relationships and patterns being formed in and around the Atlantic at the beginning of the seventeenth century. England's entry into transatlantic colonial enterprises was a literary event.  Because each colony was sponsored by a joint-stock company, the need for continuing investment was acute, and this need fostered an outpouring of writings from the colonies describing the land, its resources and qualities, the Americans, and the nature and progress of the colonies."  A dozen or so essay, bibliographies, and other helpful material.

Troubetzkoy, Ulrich, ed.  Significant Addresses of the Jamestown Festival, 1957.  Richmond: United States Jamestown-Williamsburg-Yorktown Celebrration Commission, 1958.

A record of the 350th anniversary celebration.

Tyler, Lyon Gardiner, ed.  Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606-1625.  New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907.

Along with Barbour, Billings, Brown, Haile, Kingsbury, Neill, Quinn, Robinson, and Virtual Jamestown, one of the important places to go for primary material.

Vaughan, Alden T.  "'Expulsion of the Savages': English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622."  William and Mary Quarterly 35.1 (1978): 57-84.  Reprinted in his Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience.  New York: Oxford UP, 1995.  105-27.

"For almost a decade before the massacre, a substantial number of imperial spokesmen on each side of the Atlantic favored peaceful and cooperative contact -- albeit on their own terms -- with the tribes of Eastern Virginia and had begun to fashion an integrated sociey of Indians and Europeans within the English settlements.  After the assault, such a scheme was no longer advocated or attempted.  Instead there emerged a policy of unrestrained enmity and almost total separation that reflected a persistent but often repressed contempt for the American natives. . . . All prospects of an integrated society had vanished."

Virtual Jamestown.  Ed. Crandall A. Shifflett.  1996.  2 Feb. 2006.  <https://www.virtualjamestown.org/>.

The central Jamestown site on the web for our purposes: "The Virtual Jamestown Archive is a digital research, teaching and learning project that explores the legacies of the Jamestown settlement and 'the Virginia experiment.'"  Along with Barbour, Billings, Brown, Haile, Kingsbury, Neill, Quinn, Robinson, and Tyler, one of the important places to go for primary material.

Werowocomoco Research Project.  Werowocomoco Research Group.  2 Feb. 2006. <https://powhatan.wm.edu/>.

The village of Werowocomoco was the residence of the Virginia Algonquin chief Powhatan and the political center of the Powhatan chiefdom during the early 1600s.  The Werowocomoco Research Group is studying the history and physical remains of the site.

Williams, Robert A., Jr.  "The English Conquest of Virginia."  The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest.  New York: Oxford UP, 1990.  193-225.

The Virginia chapter in the most important book on justification.  The Jamestown justification literature "reveals in fact a four-decades-long corporate effort at rationalizing the colonization process on grounds of economic efficiency. . . . shifting its emphases away from the religiously grounded and anti-Spanish motifs."  "In the transformed legal discursive formation . . . the Indians came to be viewed as  the dehumanized entry barrier to the lawfully mandated sovereignty of the English over the underutilized, savage lands of the New World."   A "peculiar utilitarian thematics" emerged "in its most refined aggressive form."  Gentili, Coke (Calvin's Case), Johnson, Gray, the "Declaration," Barkham's Case.

Wright, Louis B.  "A Western Canaan Reserved for England."  Religion and Empire: The Alliance between Piety and Commerce in English Expansion, 1585-1625.  Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1943.  84-114.

"The clergy, with the horror of domination by the Spanish Catholic empire ever present in their minds, perceived more clearly than others the significance . . . of a counter-empire. . . . that Englishmen at length accepted . . . as their imperial destiny."  Draws on Symonds, Gray, Price, Benson, Johnson, Tynley, Crashaw, Whitaker, Copland, the two 1610 "Declarations," Donne, and others.