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Author:  Abbeville Institute

It is refreshing to see a collection of essays on the central importance of Virginia and Virginians in shaping American history. I applaud McClanahan and company for giving readers a powerful and necessary corrective to New England-centric telling American history, the oppression-mongering of the 1619 Project, and to the notion that the United States is a ‘propositional nation.’ Virginia First should remind everyone that time, place, and people matter in the development of our history.
–Aaron N. Coleman, Ph.D., Professor of History, Chair, History and Political Science, University of the Cumberlands

The first English/British colony, Virginia was also the largest, most populous, and most prosperous of the Old Thirteen. When the Imperial Crisis came, Virginians presided at the First Continental Congress, commanded the Continental Army, and drafted the Declaration of Independence. The Virginia Constitution of 1776 was the first written constitution adopted by the people’s representatives in the history of the world, and Virginia’s 1776 Declaration of Rights proclaimed a right to “the free exercise of religion,” making Virginia leader in that too. Virginians presided at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and took the lead in drafting the U.S. Constitution. A Virginian congressman led the U.S. Congress in drafting the federal Bill of Rights. For thirty-two of the Federal Government’s first thirty-six years, Virginians served as president of the United States, one was vice president the other four years, and Virginians played leading roles in Congress and in creation of the first federal political party, the Jeffersonian Republican Party. Yet, as M.E. Bradford lamented, schoolchildren all over America are taught every November to recall their “Pilgrim Fathers,” as if America were one big Massachusetts. This book is a good start on recalling the primacy of Virginia in establishing American independence, American institutions, and American identity.
–Kevin R. C. Gutzman, author of Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic, 1776-1840 and The Jeffersonians: The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe

Virginia First: The 1607 Project is a cogent critique of the ideologically fraught 1619 Project, which identifies the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived in the English colonies of North America as the symbolic date of the American founding. Unlike Peter Wood’s takedown of The 1619 Project that substitutes 1620–the year the Mayflower Compact was signed–for 1619, the contributors to this volume celebrate Virginia and, specifically, Jamestown as suitably representative of a different tradition. The early Virginians were a practical and economic people, no less religious than their Puritan counterparts, only they were rooted in the land and looked to history and custom rather than reason, emotion, or revelation as their political guide. By contrast, the New Englanders were expansionist and intolerant, proselytizing with a moral certitude that led to tyranny and centralization. Edited by Brion McClanahan, this important book is a corrective, presenting a founding narrative that is not only more accurate but also more appealing than those advanced by its competitors.
–Allen Mendenhall, Associate Dean and Grady Rosier Professor in the Sorrell College of Business at Troy University

334 pages (Hardback)