Richard R. Beeman is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"With sensitivity to the complexities of the process, the author has traced an important cultural transformation in Virginia and in the South generally." --- "This book is the product of an impressive amount of primary sources and composes an excellent microcosm study of a southern country progressing through metamorphic stages from frontier to conservative agrarian community. . . . A substantial contribution to an understanding of the role of the grassroots community in the making of the social and cultural profile of the greater South." --- "Beeman's fascinating study . . . is unusually comprehensive, skillfully weaving complex economic, political, and religious matters with a broad concern for social and community change, and it is contextual, employing the case study to address the wider issue of the formation of a southern regional identity. Beeman's success at combining chronicle and process will make his work a model for future studies of this kind." --- "What makes Beeman's study of early Lunenburg especially noteworthy is the way he analyzes the failure of the rich man's culture to flourish in the poor man's country once it had been transplanted there. . . . Beeman offers a valuable insight into the nature-and the limits-of cultural authority in colonial Virginia."