Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
|
Chargement... The Baylors of Newmarket: The Decline and Fall of a Virginia Planter Familypar Thomas Katheder
Aucun Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.  JBD1 | Oct 10, 2009 |  aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Scholars and arm-chair historians of eighteenth-century America will take great pleasure in reading this exceptionally well-researched slice of colonial history. In The Baylors of Newmarket, author Thomas Katheder has meticulously researched one of the wealthiest and most socially prominent yet least known families in colonial Virginia. Drawing on mostly unpublished sources, including British and French archives and Virginia court documents, The Baylors of Newmarket is the fascinating and tragic story of Col. John Baylor III and his son John IV, including Col. Baylor's relentless pursuit of equine perfection and his son's delusional quest for the perfect Virginia mansion. The Baylors of Newmarket places the family in the larger context of a pre-Revolutionary Anglo-Virginian elite that sought to emulate the British gentry in culture, education, books and reading, dress, furnishings, and behavior. After the Revolution, the Baylors struggled to maintain what was becoming an increasingly outmoded lifestyle. This extensively referenced history also describes in rich detail the library begun by Col. Baylor III and expanded by his son John IV within the context of a strong book culture among the pre-Revolutionary Virginia gentry that has been largely underappreciated by scholars. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires 
 Google Books — Chargement...GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)973History and Geography North America United StatesClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne: (3.25)
Est-ce vous ?Devenez un(e) auteur LibraryThing. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
1
Katheder focuses on Col. John Baylor (1702-1772) and his son John Baylor IV (1750-1808). The former's letterbooks, probate inventory and purchase records from the Virginia Gazette allow us to reconstruct his library nearly completely (and I have done so here, by working with Mr. Katheder). The colonel's son added significantly to the library, which numbered between twelve and thirteen hundred volumes at the time of his death. Unfortunately no inventory of the library was made at that time, so we are unable to know with certainty what specific books John Baylor IV added to the collection. Katheder takes a good stab at the question, though, suggesting authors and types of books that John Baylor IV probably acquired during a European stay in the late 1770s (a source he thought might have been a list of books in the collection, however, has turned out to be something different, a list of European authors copied directly from Jedidiah Morse's American Universal Geography).
The book itself delves deeply into the transatlantic literary culture of the eighteenth century, and into the precarious financial state of Virginia planters (Baylor would within the span of a few years pay the highest price ever paid in colonial America for a horse - 1,000 guineas for Fearnought in 1764 - and then at his death be deeply in debt, probably insolvent). The curse of the Baylor clan seemed to be that they hadn't much head for business, but they certainly knew and cared about their books. That much is clear from Katheder's fine and detailed study.
The endnotes Katheder provides are superb, and add much to the content and context of the study.
http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/10/book-review-baylors-of-newmarket.html (