According to Maréchal (2010), “autoethnography is a form or method of research that involves self-observation and reflexive investigation in the context of ethnographic field work and writing” (p. 43).
For instance, in the 1970s, autoethnography was more narrowly defined as insider ethnography, referring to studies of the (culture of) a group of which the researcher is a member (Hayano, 1979).
Acknowledges and values a researcher's relationships with others. . . .
Social life is messy, uncertain, and emotional.
Walter Goldschmidt, former professor of anthropology at the University of California in Los Angeles, proposed that all autoethnography is focused around the self and reveals, personal investments, interpretations, and analyses.
Unlike more traditional research methods, Hayano believed there was value in a researcher conducting and writing ethnographies of their own people.
1990s: Emphasis began to be heavily placed on personal narratives and expansion of autoethnography use.
While ethnography tends to be understood as a qualitative method in the ‘social sciences’ that describes human social phenomena based on fieldwork, autoethnographers are themselves the primary participant/subject of the research in the process of writing personal stories and narratives.
In embracing personal thoughts, feelings, stories, and observations as a way of understanding the social context they are studying, autoethnographers are also shedding light on their total interaction with that setting by making their every emotion and thought visible to the reader.
Autoethnographers, therefore, tend to reject the concept of social research as an objective and neutral knowledge produced by scientific methods, which can be characterized and achieved by detachment of the researcher from the researched.
The term has a double sense - referring either to the ethnography of one's own group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest.
Analytic autoethnographers focus on developing theoretical explanations of broader social phenomena, whereas evocative autoethnographers focus on narrative presentations that open up conversations and evoke emotional responses. (p. 445) A special issue of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (Vol 35, Issue 4, August 2006) contains several articles on the diverse definitions and uses of autoethnography.
It is not considered mainstream as a method by most positivist or traditional ethnographers, yet this approach to qualitative inquiry is rapidly increasing in popularity, as can be seen by the large number of scholarly papers on autoethnography presented at annual conferences such as the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and the Advances in Qualitative Methods conference sponsored by the International Institute of Qualitative Methodology.
Portraying the performed 'self' through writing then becomes an aim to create an embodied experience for the researcher and the reader.
Ethnography and performance work together to invoke emotion in the reader.
Recent contributions include Humphreys’ (2005) exploration of career change, Pelias' (2003) performance narrative telling of the competing pressures faced by an early career academic and Sparkes’ (2007) heartfelt story of an academic manager during the stressful Research Assessment Exercise (2008).
Researchers have begun to explore the intersection of diversity, transformative learning, and autoethnography.
Drick Boyd (2008) examines the impact of white privilege on a diverse group of individuals.
In his implications, he challenges higher education institutions and educators to provide spaces for learners to engage in autoethnography as a tool to promote transformative learning.
Autoethnography is also used in film as a variant of the standard documentary film.
Unlike other documentaries, autoethnographies do not usually make a claim of objectivity.
Autoethnography is being used in multiple subdisciplines in Communication and Media Studies.
Andrew F. Herrmann examined a period of unemployment during the financial crisis through an autoethnographic approach.
As Herrmann (2013) wrote, “Our identities and identifications with popular culture artifacts assist in our creation of self.
Autoethnographer Robyn Boylorn examined televised media and the representations of race.
According to Parry and Boyle, organizational autoethnography illuminates the relationship between the individual and the organization, especially culture as it is practiced and understood within institutional and organizational settings.
In her 2015 article, Shawna Redden (2015) explores the impacts of moving from a storyteller to a “story-told-about” position in a near fatal airplane accident.
Herrmann, Barnhill, and Poole (2013) wrote a co-authored autoethnography of their experiences and impressions at an academic conference.
Reporting an autoethnography might take the form of a traditional journal article or scholarly book, performed on the stage, or be seen in the popular press.
Autoethnography can also be “associated with narrative inquiry and autobiography” (Maréchal, 2010, p. 43) in that it foregrounds experience and story as a meaning-making enterprise.
As Laurel Richardson articulates I consider writing as a method of inquiry, a way of finding out about a topic...form and content are inseparable (2000, p. 923).
According to Bochner and Ellis (2006), an autoethnographer is “first and foremost a communicator and a storyteller.”
In essence autoethnography is a story that re-enacts an experience by which people find meaning and through that meaning are able to be okay with that experience.
In this painful experience people often wonder how they will go about living without this person and what it will be like.
People, who are never really left with an explanation as to why, generally fall back on the reason that “it was their time to go” and through this somewhat “explanation” find themselves able to move on and keep living life.
And through this autoethnography is performed.
Many quantitative researchers regard the materials produced by narrative as the means by which a narrating subject, autonomous and independent...can achieve authenticity...This represents an almost total failure to use narrative to achieve serious social analysis.
As she writes, they are criticized “for being biased, navel-gazing, self-absorbed, or emotionally incontinent, and for hijacking traditional ethnographic purposes and scholarly contribution.
She echoed a quantitative stance towards narrative research by explaining I can't review someone I feel sorry or hopeless about...I'm forced to feel sorry because of the way they present themselves as: dissed blacks, abused women, or disenfranchised homosexuals - as performers, in short, who make victimhood victim art Croce illustrates what Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis refer to as 'illusory boundaries and borders between scholarship and criticism'.
Under this criterion, autoethnography becomes pseudoscience.
Who Judges?)
The criteria are: (a) Substantive contribution.
Is the text artistically shaped, satisfyingly complex, and not boring?. (c) Reflexivity.
Does this affect me emotionally and/or intellectually?
Autoethnographic manuscripts might include dramatic recall, unusual phrasing, and strong metaphors to invite the reader to ‘relive’ events with the author.
(Bochner, 2000, pp. 264~266) He looks for concrete details (similar to Richardson’s expression of lived experience), structurally complex narratives (Richardson’s aesthetic merit), author’s attempt to dig under the superficial to get to vulnerability and honesty (Richardson’s reflexivity), a standard of ethical self-consciousness (Richardson’s substantive contribution), and a moving story (Richardson’s impact) (Ellis, 2004, pp. 253~254).
Make contributions to knowledge Value the personal and experiential Demonstrate the power, craft, and responsibilities of stories and storytelling Take a relationally responsible approach to research practice and representation Adams, Ellis, and Jones define the first goal of autoethnography as a conscious effort to 'extend existing knowledge and research while recognizing that knowledge is both situated and contested'.
Ellis' Maternal Connections can be considered a successful incorporation of the first goal in that she 'questions the idea of care-giving as a burden, instead of portraying caregiving as a loving and meaning-making relationship'.
In Jones' Lost and Found essay she writes, I convey the sadness and the joy I feel about my relationships with my adopted child, the child I chose not to adopt, and my grandmother.
Autoethnography showcases the power of stories as the means in which sensemaking and researcher reflexivity create important descriptions and critiques of culture.
Adams switches between first-person and second-person narrationin Living (In) the Closet: The Time of Being Closeted as a way to 'bring readers into my story, inviting them to live my experiences alongside me, feeling how I felt and suggesting how they might, under similar circumstances, act as I did'.
The ability of autoethnographers to explore different narrative structures can be seen in Andrew Herrmann's use of layered accounts, Ellis' use of haibun, and the use of autoethnographic film by Rebecca Long and Anne Harris, to name but a few.
Included under this goal is the accessibility of the work to a variety of readers which allows for the 'opportunity to engage and improve the lives of our selves, participants, and readers/audiences'.
Similar sentiments are echoed throughout Adams, Jones, and Ellis critiques of their own writing.
Carolyn Ellis writes, “In autoethnographic work, I look at validity in terms of what happens to readers as well as to research participants and researchers.
(Ellis, 2004, p. 124).
If you do, it will help you work through the meaning and purpose of the story.
(Ellis, 2004, p. 126) Art argues that the real questions is what narratives do, what consequences they have, to what uses they can be put.
Similarly, Laurel Richardson uses the metaphor of a crystal to deconstruct traditional validity (Richardson, 1997, p. 92).
Another writer, Patti Lather, proposes counter-practices of authority that rupture validity as a ‘regime of truth’ (Lather, 1993, p .674) and lead to a critical political agenda (Olesen, 2000, p. 231).
Ellis says, “I would argue that a story’s generalizability is always being tested – not in the traditional way through random samples of respondents, but by readers as they determine if a story speaks to them about their experience or about the lives of others they know.
We can ask, after Stake, ‘does the story have ‘naturalistic generalization’?’ meaning that it brings ‘felt’ news from one world to another and provides opportunities for the reader to have vicarious experience of the things told.
Autoethnographic writing should be closely aligned with theoretical reflection, says Clough, so that it can serve as a vehicle for thinking ‘new sociological subjects’ and forming ‘new parameters of the social.’
In addition to helping the researcher make sense of his or her individual experience, autoethnographies are political in nature as they engage their readers in important political issues and often ask us to consider things, or do things differently.
Denzin says authoethnography must be literary, present cultural and political issues, and articulate a politics of hope.
While advocating autoethnography for its value, some researchers argue that there are also several concerns about autoethnography.
Robert Krizek (2003) contributed a chapter of 'Ethnography as the Excavation of 'Personal Narrative' (pp. 141–152)to the book of Expressions of Ethnography in which he expresses concern about the possibility for autoethnography to devolve into narcissism.
First, some researchers have criticized that within qualitative research there are those that dismiss anything but positivist notions of validity and reliability. (see Doloriert and Sambrook, 2011, pp. 593–595) For example, Schwandt (1996, p. 60) argues that some social researchers have “come to equate being rational in social science with being procedural and criteriological.”
Smith (1984, p. 390) points out that What is clear . . . is that the assumptions of interpretive inquiry are incompatible with the desire for foundational criteria.
Bochner (2000) and Clough (2000) both are concerned that too much emphasis on criteria will move us back to methodological policing and will takes us away from a focus on imagination, ethical issues in autographic work, and creating better ways of living.
Practice-based quality is based in the lived research experience itself rather than in its formal evidencing per se.
The controversy surrounding autoethnography is in part related to the problematic exclusive use of the self to produce research (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994).
Sparkes (2000) suggested that autoethnography is at the boundaries of academic research because such accounts do not sit comfortably with traditional criteria used to judge qualitative inquiries(Holt, 2003, p. 19).
Additionally, verification issues relating to methods and representation are (re)considered as problematic (Marcus & Fischer, 1986).
In justifying autoethnography as proper research, it should be noted that ethnographers have acted autobiographically before, but in the past they may not have been aware of doing so, and taken their genre for granted (Coffey, 1999).
As reviewers begin to develop ways in which to judge autoethnography, they must resist the temptation to seek universal foundational criteria lest one form of dogma simply replaces another (Sparkes, 2002b, p. 223).
The Astor House Hotel has been on the North Bund of Shanghai, by the northern end of the Waibaidu Bridge (Chinese: 外 白 渡 ; pinyin: Wàibáidù Qiáo) (the Garden Bridge in English), since 1858.
It occupies an entire block, and is across the road from the Russian Consulate, and previously the embassies of Germany, the United States and Japan.
Afterward, the resident foreign population of the British concession increased: In 1844 years end it was 50, in the following year 90, and after five years it had grown to 175.
Richards had been doing business in China from about 1840; and in 1844 had established P.F. Richards & Co. (of Shanghai and Fuchowfoo).
These were located south of the Yangkingpang (Yangjingbang) creek.
The very first public meeting of the British settlement was held in the newly opened Richards' Hotel on 22 December 1846.
According to Shanghai historian Peter Hibbard, the completion of the Wills Bridge allowed the expansion of the over-crowded settlement.
The new Hotel was a two-story East India style building.
By 1859 the hotel was renamed (in English) the Astor House Hotel, while retaining the original Chinese name until 1959.
By October 1868 George Baker was the proprietor of the Astor House.
After the 1876 expansion the hotel was four large neo-Renaissance brick buildings linked together by stone passageways.
In July 1882, the Astor House Hotel became the first building in China to be lit by electricity, and in 1883 it became the first building in Shanghai to install running water.
During 1889, The Shanghai Land Investment Company Limited (SLIC), which was formed in December 1888, purchased the extensive estate known as the Wills' Estate, which includes the site of the Astor House Hotel, and possesses one of the best business situations in Hongkew for 390,000 taels, approximately US$290,000.
By 1890, For foreigners the Astor House was the center of social activity.
After her husband's death, Ellen Jansen operated the Astor House.
On 5 November 1897, China's first prom was hosted at the Astor House, which celebrated the 60th birthday of Cixi, the Emperor Dowager, thus ending the social stricture that women should not attend social events; On 1 November 1900 Mrs Ellen Jansen sold the Astor House Hotel for 175,000 taels (about US$130.000) to Frenchman Auguste Vernon, who owned another hotel in Hankow and had previously managed the Hotel Bella Vista in Macau from its opening on 1 July 1890 until he left due to serious illness.
Vernon added a suite of eighteen bedrooms and saloons to the Hotel.
However, later In the first six months of 1901 the Astor Astor House Hotel had generated a profit of $90,000.61, while its sister hotel in Hankow made just over $10,000.
Vernon wanted to demolish the Chinese shops to allow the construction of a new wing containing 250 rooms, increasing its total capacity to 300 rooms.
By July 1906 retired British naval officer Captain Frederick W. Davies, who had previously been a sea captain on the NYK European Service, and associate manager of the Grand Hotel in Yokohama, had become manager of the Astor House.
Architects Davies & Thomas designed the three main wings of the new Astor House Hotel.
The intention was to rebuild the hotel on modern lines, using reinforced concrete as the primary building material.
A new reinforced concrete wharf measuring long and wide was also constructed.
In September 1910, days after the annual meeting of the Astor House Hotel Co., Brauen ran off with a huge chunk of hotel funds just three months before the hotel opened, six months behind schedule, in January 1911.
The North-China Herald reported: The enduring impression of a city is largely given by the buildings that first catch the eye.
The Shanghai resident regards it with equal admiration and also with a sense of personal pride.
A huge, but stately seal has in a sense been set upon the city's aspirations, and it stands at once as an emblem of accomplishment and an example for emulation.
Main Dining Room Seats 500 Guests, and is Electrically Cooled.
Rates from $6; Special Monthly Terms.
On the ground floor, at the corner of Whangpoo Road and the Broadway, is a handsomely appointed public bar-room and buffet, 59 ft. by 51 ft; in the centre, with main entrance from Whangpoo Road, is a magnificent lounge ball, 70 ft. by 60 ft., and at the East end are the Hotel office and the manager's office, with the secretary's office, in mezzanine, above the latter.
Farther up the grand staircase is the main dining hall, almost the whole length of the building with a gallery and verandah on the second floor and well lighted by a barreled ceiling of glass.
Additionally, the Hotel now had a 24-hour hot water supply, some of the earliest elevators in China, and each of the 250 guest rooms had its own telephone, as well as an attached bath.
In 1911 John H. Russell, Jr. told his daughter, the future Brooke Astor, that the Hotel offered the finest service in the world, and that in response to her question about a man dressed in a white skirt and blue jacket beside every second door, was told by Russell: They are the 'boys.' ...
The Secretary of the Hotel, Mr. Whitlow, was appointed acting manager, but was soon replaced by Mr. Olsen.
On 30 June 1912 a serious crisis confronted the shareholders of the Astor House Hotel Company.
The interest was finally paid after mortgaging the Astor Garden (B.C. Lot 1744), the foreshore property between Whangpoo Road and the Suchow Creek, for 25,000 taels (US$33,333.33).
At that time, No hotel in Shanghai, and few in the world, surpassed the Astor House Hotel.
At this time there were still restrictions on Chinese entering the Astor House Hotel.
The idea is soon dissipated when you find yourself following a man clad in bath-room slippers and shirt to the feet, the whiteness of which is relieved by a long black pigtail hanging down his back.
A gallery runs down either side, and in the busy season is also filled with tables.
During 1914, the Astor Gardens, the portion of the hotel grounds at the front of the Hotel known as the foreshore that had stretched to the Suzhou Creek, was sold to allow the construction of the consulate of the Empire of Russia immediately in front of the Hotel.
In September 1915 The trustees subsequently sold the Astor House Hotel Company Limited and all of its property and assets, including over 10 mow of land, to Central Stores Limited, owners of the Palace Hotel, for 705,000 taels.
According to one report, Ezra amassed a vast fortune estimated at from twenty to thirty million dollars primarily through the importation of opium, and successful real estate investment and management in early twentieth century Shanghai.
Morton was a retired ship captain who ran it as a ship, the hotel had corridors painted with portholes and trompe l'oeil seascapes and rooms decorated like cabins; there was even a steerage section with bunks instead of beds at cheaper rates.
At the time, Shanghai was considered the Paradise of Adventurers, and the ornate but old-fashioned lobby of the Astor House was considered its hub.
Despite an annual profit of $596,437 in the previous year, in April 1920 Morton was forced to resign as the manager of the Shanghai Hotels Companies, Ltd, due to a new British government Order in Council restricting management of British companies to British subjects.
Banquets a special feature, and a French chef employed.
Under the leadership of Edward Ezra, the Astor House Hotel made a handsome profit.
On 12 May 1922 Ezra's 80% controlling interest in The Shanghai Hotels Limited was purchased for 2.5 million Mexican dollars by Hongkong Hotels Limited, Asia's oldest hotel company, which already owned the Hongkong Hotel, as well as the Peak, Repulse Bay, and Peninsula Hotels in Kowloon; Messrs. William Powells Ltd., a large department store in Hong Kong; the Hong Kong Steam Laundry; and three large parking garages in Hong Kong. managing director of Hongkong Hotels Limited, who was of Lowland Scot heritage, of evidently very humble parentage, who was married to an American millionaire heiress, was described as dynamic, In October 1923 Taggart helped engineer the merger of Shanghai Hotels Limited and the Hongkong Hotel Company, to create Hong Kong & Shanghai Hotels, Limited with himself as managing director.
By the early 1920s, the Astor House Hotel had become an international institution in fame and reputation.
According to Peter Hibbard, The Roaring Twenties saw Shanghai entering a period of frenetic growth, only tamed in the late 1930s, with the old fabric of the city being torn apart in a rapacious drive towards modernisation.
The first of a long stream of round-the-world cruise-liners began to call on the city in 1921 and by the early 1930s, Shanghai was playing host to around 40,000 globetrotters each year.
By the beginning of 1923, there were those who felt the Astor House Hotel needed improvement.
Additionally, the large public spaces created in the previous renovations were not proving profitable.
The North-China Herald described the ballroom: The light blue walls decorated with maidens and sylphs dancing in the open spaces, are surmounted by the plaster reliefs for the indirect lighting system suspended from the ceiling, while high on the marble pillars beautifully cast female figures appear to support the roof.
By April 1924 the manager was Jacques Kiass.
Isabel Peake Duke recalled being at a tea dance at the Astor during an earthquake in 1926, during which the walls of the hotel were visibly shaking and swaying.
Her only complaint was the lack of air-conditioning, necessitating overhead ceiling fans and fountains of water to keep the dancers cool in the summer months.
These afternoon tea dances at the Majestic Hotel and the Astor House became the first places where 'polite' foreign and Chinese society met.
Elise McCormick indicated in 1928, Tea dances at the Astor House formerly took place only once a week.
In 1927 the Astor House Hotel in Shanghai was included in Robert Ludy's Historic Hotels of the World, where it was indicated that the Astor House Hotel...has been the principal hostelry for more than fifty years.
Another valuable employee was Mr Kammerling, a Russian Jew (born in Turkey) who became Reception Clerk: With an amazing flair for languages and the opportunity to work with people of many cultures, Mr H. Kammerling eventually learned to converse fluently and faultlessly in German, English, French, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese and one or two other languages, as well as his native Russian and Turkish.
The completion of the Cathay Hotel in 1929, threw a painful shadow upon the old-fashioned Astor House.
In 1912, when the American Consulate was constructed on Huangpu Road, and just after the re-opening of the Astor House after extensive renovations, the Hongkou area was considered a most desirable location, however by 1932 the area had deteriorated, due in part to the proliferation of Japanese businesses and residents, with many Chinese refusing to cross into the Hongkou district.
And the comfort of its tower bedrooms has brought wrinkles to the foreheads of the managers of the old Astor House and the Palace Hotel.
James Lafayette Hutchison, on his return to the Astor House in the 1930s after several years absence in the United States, noticed no changes: I walked across the bridge and registered at the old Astor House Hotel....
According to Canadian journalist Gordon Sinclair, by 1931 the Shanghai Press Club used the Astor as their regular meeting place, and overseas Chinese frequently stayed there.
Reports to the United States Department of State indicated: Chinese shells once more fell in neighborhood of wharf area of Hongkew.
Immediately there was the wildest panic. . . .
The fighting and shelling in the vicinity of the Astor House Hotel resulted in consternation among the guests, but the arrival of four American naval vessels on 1 February 1932 partially alleviated their concerns.
On 27 February 1932 Japanese sailors pursued Chinese Brigadier General Ken Wang (Wang Keng or Wang Kang) (born 1895), then a recent West Point graduate, whom they believed to be a spy, into the lobby of the Astor House Hotel and arrested him, in violation of the international law that operated in the International Settlement, without explanation or apologies, and refused to turn him over to the police of the International Settlement.
In 1934 the Astor House's tariffs were, in Mexican dollars (approximately 1/3 of an American dollar): single, $12; double, $20; suite- for two, $30. the sometime paramour of Sir Victor Sassoon, from 1935 until her departure for Hong Kong in 1941.
The Hotel was damaged during the Battle of Shanghai when the Japanese invaded Shanghai in August 1937 at the outset of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
In the following days, some 18,000 to 20,000 Europeans, Americans and Japanese evacuated to Hong Kong, Manila, and Japan, including Lawrence and Horace Kadoorie, who fled to Hong Kong.
American foreign correspondent Irène Corbally Kuhn, one of the writers of the 1932 film, The Mask of Fu Manchu, and then a reporter for The China Press, described the hotel as the most famous inn on the China coast, redundantly identified as the Astor House Hotel, and also the damage inflicted upon it during the 1937 Japanese invasion: from the street the boards were up over the shop fronts.
The Japanese subsequently leased the hotel for a three-year term to another party, with a reasonable return remitted to the absent owners.
Alcott told about it.
Finally the Japanese turned their transmitter over to some Shanghai Nazis.
During the Japanese occupation the Astor House was also used to house prominent British (and later American) nationals captured by the Japanese., Later the Astor House Hotel was used as the Japanese General headquarters, before being leased as a hotel for the duration of the war.
Hibbard indicates the hotel fared badly in the war and extensive refurbishment bills were deferred following its requisition by the US Army, in September 1945.
By 1946 White Russian refugee Len Tarasov had become manager of the Astor House Hotel, but was fired when a Chinese businessman leased the Hotel from the Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels Ltd (HKSH) in 1947.
The hotel was filled with members of organisations involved in the post-war reconstruction of China, including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Association.
Diplomatic tensions between the new Chinese government and the United Kingdom further complicated the dispute.
Prior to the Hotel's re-opening as the Pujiang Hotel in 1959, the building had been used by a tea and textile trading company as offices and dormitories, as well as by the Chinese Navy.
In 1990, the ballroom of the west wing of the hotel was being occupied by the newly reopened Shanghai Stock Exchange, until its relocation to Pudong in 1998.
Only the ballroom still shows signs of life.
Hengshan established a committee of scholars and experts which concluded that the hotel should be saved.
In 2002 the first phase of renovation was completed, and cost about 7 million renminbi to refurbish the 35 VIP rooms.
We want the investor to pay a leasing fee and provide some of the money for renovation.
During the renovations in 2004 several significant discoveries were made: Seven century-old, white marble clapboards embossed with carvings of the Egyptian Sphinx were recently found in a hotel storage room that has been sealed for decades.
We'll relocate them to where they were, providing them a chance to function again as before.
The air of faded grandeur is enhanced by the fact that previous guests have included Einstein and Charlie Chaplin.
In 2006 the Morning Shanghai restaurant opened at the Astor House.
2008 Forever Enthralled (traditional Chinese: 梅 蘭 芳 ; simplified Chinese: 梅 兰 芳 ; pinyin: Méi Lánfāng), a biographical account of Mei Lanfang, China's greatest opera star, directed by Chen Kaige, filmed some of its scenes at the Astor House Hotel.
The Virginia Company colony was looking for gold but failed and the colonists could barely feed themselves.
After 1662, the colony turned black slavery into a hereditary racial caste.
Warfare with the Virginia Indian nations had been a factor in the 17th century; after 1700 there was continued conflict with natives east of the Alleghenies, especially in the French and Indian War (1754-1763), when the tribes were allied with the French.
The colony was dominated by rich planters who were also in control of the established Anglican Church.
They were important in the Declaration of Independence, writing the Constitutional Convention (and preserving protection for the slave trade), and establishing the Bill of Rights.
During the first half of the 19th century, tobacco prices declined and tobacco lands lost much of their fertility.
The population grew slowly from 700,000 in 1790, to 1 million in 1830, to 1.2 million in 1860.
Unionists in western Virginia created the separate state of West Virginia.
In 1883 conservative white Democrats regained power in the state government, ending Reconstruction and implementing Jim Crow laws.
After World War II, the state's economy thrived, with a new industrial and urban base.
Since the late 20th century, the contemporary economy has become more diversified in high-tech industries and defense-related businesses.
Archaeological and historical research by anthropologist Helen C. Rountree and others has established 3,000 years of settlement in much of the Tidewater.
The largest group, the Algonquian, numbered over 10,000 and occupied most of the coastal area up to the fall line.
When the first English settlers arrived at Jamestown in 1607, Algonquian tribes controlled most of Virginia east of the fall line.
In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a chief named Wahunsunacock created this powerful empire by conquering or affiliating with approximately thirty tribes whose territories covered much of what is now eastern Virginia.
After their discovery of the New World in the 15th century, European states began trying to establish New World colonies.
In the spring of 1567, Hernando Moyano de Morales, a sergeant of Spanish explorer Juan Pardo, led a group of soldiers northward from Fort San Juan in Joara, a native town in what is now western North Carolina, to attack and destroy the Chisca village of Maniatique near present-day Saltville.
During this voyage, two Kiskiack or Paspahegh youths, including Don Luis were taken back to Spain.
In August 1572, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived from St. Augustine with thirty soldiers and sailors to take revenge for the massacre of the Jesuits, and hanged approximately 20 natives.
The Roanoke Colony was the first English colony in the New World.
The final group disappeared completely after supplies from England were delayed three years by a war with Spain.
Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe reported that a regional king named Wingina ruled a land of Wingandacoa.
On the second voyage, Raleigh discovered that, while the chief of the Secotans was indeed called Wingina, the expression wingandacoa, heard by the English upon arrival, actually meant You wear good clothes in Carolina Algonquian, and was not the native name of the country, as previously misunderstood.
There were two competing branches of the Virginia Company and each hoped to establish a colony in Virginia in order to exploit gold (which the region did not actually have), to establish a base of support for English privateering against Spanish ships, and to spread Protestantism to the New World in competition with Spain's spread of Catholicism.
After a long, rough voyage of 144 days, the colonists finally arrived in Virginia on April 26, 1607 at the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay.
After weeks of exploration, the colonists selected a location and founded Jamestown on May 14, 1607.
It lacked drinking water, access to game for hunting, or much space for farming.
They had planned on trading with the Native Americans for food, were dependent upon periodic supplies from England, and had planned to spend some of their time seeking gold.
After several failed leaders, Captain John Smith took charge of the settlement, and many credit him with sustaining the colony during its first years, as he had some success in trading for food and leading the discouraged colonists.
The colonists faced what became known as the starving time.
In June 1610, he arrived with 150 men and ample supplies.
The economy of the Colony was another problem.
The First Anglo-Powhatan War ended when Rolfe married Pocahontas in 1614.
Also in 1619, the Virginia Company sent 90 single women as potential wives for the male colonists to help populate the settlement.
They, along with many European indentured servants helped to expand the growing tobacco industry which was already the colony's primary product.
In some areas, individual rather than communal land ownership or leaseholds were established, providing families with motivation to increase production, improve standards of living, and gain wealth.
It was the first in North America.
They believed that the environment could and should be forced to yield quick financial returns.
This extreme individualism led to the failure of the settlers to provide defense for themselves against the Indians, resulting in two massacres.
Virginia has drought conditions an average of every three years.
As tobacco exhausted the soil, the settlers continually needed to clear more land for replacement.
The tribes tried to fight the encroachment by the colonists.
The European colonists had expanded territory so that they controlled virtually all the land east of the fall line on the James River.
Some retained small communities with more traditional identity and heritage.
State celebrations gave Native American tribes prominent formal roles to showcase their contributions to the state.
He had earned a reputation as a fierce warrior under his brother's chiefdom.
With coordinated attacks, they struck almost all the English settlements along the James River, on both shores, from Newport News Point on the east at Hampton Roads all the way west upriver to Falling Creek, a few miles above Henricus and John Rolfe's plantation, Varina Farms.
They had no time to warn outposts, which suffered deaths and captives at almost every location.
The facilities were destroyed.
The colonists invited the chiefs and warriors to Jamestown, where they proposed a toast of liquor.
The period between the coup of 1622 and another Powhatan attack on English colonists along the James River (see Jamestown) in 1644 marked a turning point in the relations between the Powhatan and the English.
Under royal authority, the colony began to expand to the North and West with additional settlements.
The first significant attempts at exploring the Trans-Allegheny region occurred under the administration of Governor William Berkeley.
The colonists defined the 1644 coup as an uprising.
While imprisoned, he was murdered by one of his guards.
This governor was a moderate Puritan who allowed the local legislature to exercise most controlling authority, and spent much of his time directing affairs in neighboring Maryland Colony.
Some intermarried with existing plantation families to establish influential families in Virginia such as the Washingtons, Randolphs, Carters and Lees.
Governor Berkeley, who remained popular after his first administration, returned to the governorship at the end of Commonwealth rule.
Berkeley established autocratic authority over the colony.
Berkeley finally did face a rebellion in 1676.
Berkeley did not assist the settlers in their fight.
Nathaniel Bacon organized his own militia of settlers who retaliated against the Indians.
After a lack of reform, Bacon rebelled outright, captured Jamestown, and took control of the colony for several months.
Bacon burned Jamestown before abandoning it and continued his rebellion, but died of disease.
After the burning of Jamestown, the capital was temporarily moved to Middle Plantation, located on the high ground of the Virginia Peninsula equidistant from the James and York Rivers.
Finally, seven decades later, with encouragement from the Colony's House of Burgesses and other prominent individuals, Reverend Dr. James Blair, the colony's top religious leader, prepared a plan.
The rebuilt statehouse in Jamestown burned again in 1698.
As the English increasingly used tobacco products, tobacco in the American colonies became a significant economic force, especially in the tidewater region surrounding the Chesapeake Bay.
Planters would then fill large hogsheads with tobacco and convey them to inspection warehouses.
They controlled the local Anglican church, choosing ministers and handling church property and disbursing local charity.
The bottom third owned no land, and verged on poverty.
In some districts there 70 percent of the land was owned by a handful of families, and three fourths of the whites had no land at all.
Entrepreneurs had begun to mine and smelt the local iron ores.
In America, game was more than plentiful.
In 1691 Sir Francis Nicholson, the governor, organized competitions for the better sort of Virginians onely who are Batchelors, and he offered prizes to be shot for, wrastled, played at backswords, & Run for by Horse and foott.
Selected slaves often became skilled horse trainers.
Historian Timothy Breen explains that horse racing and high-stakes gambling were essential to maintaining the status of the gentry.
Racism made it possible for white Virginians to develop a devotion to the equality that English republicans had declared to be the soul of liberty.
The climate was mild, the farm lands were cheap and fertile.
By the 1730s, the Three Notch'd Road extended from the vicinity of the fall line of the James River at the future site of Richmond westerly to the Shenandoah Valley, crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains at Jarmans Gap.
According to Encyclopedia Virginia, By 1735 there were as many as 160 families in the backcountry region, and within ten years nearly 10,000 Europeans lived in the Shenandoah Valley.
Lord Fairfax travelled to Virginia for the first time between 1735 and 1737 to inspect and protect his lands.
In the late 1740s and the second half of the 18th century, the British angled for control of the Ohio Country.
Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia was an investor in the Ohio Company, which stood to lose money if the French held their claim.
At the completion of the war, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbade all British settlement past a line drawn along the Appalachian Mountains, with the land west of the Proclamation Line known as the Indian Reserve.British colonists and land speculators objected to the proclamation boundary since the British government had already assigned land grants to them.
Prominent American colonials joined with the land speculators in Britain to lobby the government to move the line further west.
However, the Northwest Territories north of the Ohio continued to be occupied by native tribes until US forces drove them out in the early decades of the 1800s.
In practice, establishment meant that local taxes were funneled through the local parish to handle the needs of local government, such as roads and poor relief, in addition to the salary of the minister.
Missionaries were sent to the Indians but they had little success apart from the Nansemond tribe, which had converted in 1638.
Especially in the back country, most families had no religious affiliation whatsoever and their low moral standards were shocking to proper Englishmen The Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians and other evangelicals directly challenged these lax moral standards and refused to tolerate them in their ranks.
By the 1760s Baptists were drawing Virginians, especially poor white farmers, into a new, much more democratic religion.
Methodists encouraged an end to slavery, and welcomed free blacks and slaves into active roles in the congregations.
Historians have debated the implications of the religious rivalries for the American Revolution.
This effort failed when non-Anglicans gave their support to Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom, which eventually became law in 1786 as the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.
Revolutionary sentiments first began appearing in Virginia shortly after the French and Indian War ended in 1763.
Patrick Henry first came to prominence by arguing in the case of Parson's Cause against the veto, which he declared tyrannical.
The General Assembly opposed the passage of the Sugar Act on the grounds of no taxation without representation, and in turn passing the Virginia Resolves opposing the tax.
Various political groups, including the Sons of Liberty met and issued protests against the act.
The Assembly met to consider resolutions condemning on the transport of the rioters, but Governor Botetourt, while sympathetic, dissolved the legislature.
In 1773, because of a renewed attempt to extradite Americans to Britain, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason, and others in the legislature created a committee of correspondence to deal with problems with Britain.
The first Virginia Convention was held August 1–6 to respond to the growing crisis.
Patrick Henry led a group of Virginia militia from Hanover in response to Dunmore's order.
He fled the Governor's Palace to a British ship at Yorktown.
On December 9, 1775, Virginia militia moved on the governor's forces at the Battle of Great Bridge, winning a victory in the small action there.
Nevertheless, Virginia sent forces to help in the fighting to the North and South, as well as the frontier in the northwest.
Richard Henry Lee introduced the measure on June 7.
The constitution of the Fifth Virginia Convention created a system of government for the state that would last for 54 years, and converting House of Burgesses into a bicameral legislature with both a House of Delegates and a Senate.
Fearing the vulnerability of Williamsburg, Governor Thomas Jefferson moved the capital farther inland to Richmond in 1780.
Phillips led an expedition that destroyed military and economic targets, against ineffectual militia resistance.
Cornwallis dispatched two smaller missions under Colonel John Graves Simcoe and Colonel Banastre Tarleton to march on Charlottesville and capture Gov. Jefferson and the legislature, though was foiled when Jack Jouett rode to warn Virginia government.
Gen. Washington and his French ally Rochambeau moved their forces from New York to Virginia.
Papers for surrender were officially signed on October 19.
Victory in the Revolution brought peace and prosperity to the new state, as export markets in Europe reopened for its tobacco.
Madison proposed the Virginia Plan, which would give representation in Congress according to total population, including a proportion of slaves.
Ratification was bitterly contested; the pro-Constitution forces prevailed only after promising to add a Bill of Rights.
He was followed by the Virginia Dynasty, including Thomas Jefferson, Madison, and James Monroe, giving the state four of the first five presidents.
Thousands left with the British for resettlement in their colonies of Nova Scotia and Jamaica; others went to England; others disappeared into rural and frontier areas or the North.
One planter, Robert Carter III freed more than 450 slaves in his lifetime, more than any other planter.
Among the oldest black Baptist congregations in the nation were two founded near Petersburg before the Revolution.
White reaction was swift and harsh, and militias killed many innocent free blacks and black slaves as well as those directly involved in the rebellions.
As the new nation of the United States of America experienced growing pains and began to speak of Manifest Destiny, Virginia, too, found its role in the young republic to be changing and challenging.
In 1775, Daniel Boone blazed a trail for the Transylvania Company from Fort Chiswell in Virginia through the Cumberland Gap into central Kentucky.
In 1792, three western counties split off to form Kentucky.
The 1803 Louisiana Purchase only accelerated the westward movement of Virginians out of their native state.
Virginians Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were influential in their famous 1804-1806 expedition to explore the Missouri River and possible connections to the Pacific Ocean.
Historians estimate that one million Virginians left the commonwealth between the Revolution and the Civil War.
Today, many cultural features of the American South can be attributed to Virginians who migrated west.
While planters were moving away from labor-intensive tobacco to mixed crops, they still held numerous slaves and their leasing out or sales was also part of their economic prospect.
In the western reaches, families farmed smaller homesteads, mostly without enslaved or hired labor.
Representation in the state legislature was heavily skewed in favor of the more populous eastern areas and the historic planter elite.
Thus, at the outset of the American Civil War, Virginia was caught not only in national crisis, but in a long-standing controversy within its own boundaries.
Virginia was home to the first of all Federal infrastructure projects under the new Constitution, the Cape Henry Light of 1792, located at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.
Across the James River, Fort Monroe was built to defend Hampton Roads, completed in 1834.
The first railroad in Virginia to be powered by locomotives was the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad, chartered in 1834, with the intent to connect with steamboat lines at Aquia Landing running to Washington, D.C..
Under Engineer Claudius Crozet, the railroad successfully crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains via the Blue Ridge Tunnel at Afton Mountain.
With extensive iron deposits, especially in the western counties, Virginia was a pioneer in the iron industry.
Ironmasters hired slaves from local slave owners because they were cheaper than white workers, easier to control, and could not switch to a better employer.
Bradford (1959) recounts the many complaints about slave laborers and argues the over-reliance upon slaves contributed to the failure of the ironmasters to adopt improved methods of production for fear the slaves would sabotage them.
On April 17, 1861 the convention voted to secede, and voters ratified the decision on May 23.
Because of its strategic significance, the Confederacy relocated its capital to Richmond.
The city was the site of numerous army hospitals.
Saltville was a primary source of Confederate salt (critical for food preservation) during the war, leading to the two Battles of Saltville.
Both sides mobilized for war; the year 1861 went on without another major fight.
The western counties could not tolerate the Confederacy.
From May to August 1861, a series of Unionist conventions met in Wheeling; the Second Wheeling Convention constituted itself as a legislative body called the Restored Government of Virginia.
The vote was in favor of a new state—West Virginia—which was distinct from the Pierpont government, which persisted until the end of the war.
The state and national governments in Richmond did not recognize the new state, and Confederates did not vote there.
Union victories in 1861 drove the Confederate forces out of the Monongahela and Kanawha valleys, and throughout the remainder of the war the Union held the region west of the Alleghenies and controlled the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the north.
By October 1862 the northern 9th and 10th Congressional districts along the Potomac were under Union control.
In 1864, the Union Army planned to attack Richmond by a direct overland approach through Overland Campaign and the Battle of the Wilderness, culminating in the Siege of Petersburg which lasted from the summer of 1864 to April 1865.
The Confederate government fled south, pausing in Danville for a few days.
Historian Mary Farmer-Kaiser reports that white landowners complained to the Bureau about unwillingness of freedwomen to work in the fields as evidence of their laziness, and asked the Bureau to force them to sign labor contracts.
Furthermore, agents urged poor unmarried mothers to give their older children up as apprentices to work for white masters.
Immediately after the war President Andrew Johnson recognized the Francis Harrison Pierpont government as legitimate and restored local government.
Johnson was satisfied that Reconstruction was complete.
After winning large majorities in the 1866 national election, the Radical Republicans gained power in Congress.
McDonough, finding that Schofield was criticized by conservative whites for supporting the Radical cause on the one hand, and attacked on the other by Radicals for thinking black suffrage was premature on the other, concludes that he performed admirably' by following a middle course between extremes.
The more radical element set out to disfranchise whites—such as not allowing a man to hold office if he was a private in the Confederate army, or had sold food to the Confederate government, plus land reform.
The True Republicans (the moderates), led by former Whigs, businessmen and planters, while supportive of black suffrage, drew the line at property confiscation.
The Virginia Republican party became permanently split, and many moderate Republicans switched to the opposition Conservatives.
Called the Underwood Constitution after the presiding officer, the main accomplishment was to reform the tax system, and create a system of free public schools for the first time in Virginia.
He appointed a personal friend, Henry H. Wells as provisional governor.
They took away contracts for state printing orders from Hunnicutt's newspaper.
The Republicans nominated Wells for governor, as Hunnicutt and most Scalawags went over to the opposition.
Mahone recommended that whites had to accept the results of the war, including civil rights and the vote for Freedmen.
Mahone's plan worked, as the voters in 1869 elected Walker and defeated the proposed disfranchisement of ex-Confederates.
Virginia was the only southern state that did not elect a civilian government that represented more Radical Republican principles.
The great majority of the Old Dominion's white citizens could not take seriously a political party composed primarily of former slaves.
In 1870, several railroads were merged to form the Atlantic, Mississippi and Ohio Railroad, later renamed & Western].
The rebuilt Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad eventually was linked to Washington, D.C..
The growth of railroads resulted in the creation of new towns and rapid growth of others, including Clifton Forge, Roanoke, Crewe and Victoria.
Tobacco magnates such as Lewis Ginter funded a number of public institutions.
After his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1877, former confederate General and railroad executive William Mahone became the leader of the Readjusters, forming a coalition of conservative Democrats and white and black Republicans.
Its proposal to repeal the poll tax and increase funding for schools and other public facilities attracted biracial and cross-party support.
Readjusters' effective control of Virginia politics lasted until 1883, when they lost majority control in the state legislature, followed by the election of Democrat Fitzhugh Lee as governor in 1885.
He was the first black elected to Congress from the state, and the last for nearly a century.
He had long been active in the abolitionist cause in Ohio before the Civil War, had been president of the National Equal Rights League from 1864 to 1868, and had headed and created the law department at Howard University, and acted as president of the college.
In 1884, the state acquired a bankrupt women's college at Farmville and opened it as a normal school.
After the Readjuster Party disappeared, Virginia Democrats rapidly passed legislation and constitutional amendments that effectively disfranchised African Americans and many poor whites, through the use of poll taxes and literacy tests.
In 1902 Virginia passed a new constitution that reduced voter registration.
Swanson's coalition of reformers in the legislature, built schools and highways, raised teacher salaries and standards, promoted the state's public health programs, and increased funding for prisons.
After Swanson moved to the U.S. Senate in 1910 he promoted Progressivism at the national level as a supporter of President Woodrow Wilson, who had been born in Virginia and was considered a native son.
The State Corporation Commission (SCC) was formed as part of the 1902 Constitution, over the opposition of the railroads, to regulate railroad policies and rates.
Virginia has a long history of agricultural reformers, and the Progressive Era stimulated their efforts.
With federal help, in they set up a county agent system (today the Virginia Cooperative Extension) that taught farmers the latest scientific methods for dealing with tobacco and other crops, and farm house wives how to maximize their efficiency in the kitchen and nursery.
The woman suffrage movement became entangled in racial issues—whites were reluctant to allow black women the vote—and was unable to broaden its base beyond middle-class whites.
His goal was the transformation of the southern university into a force for state service and intellectual leadership. and educational utility.
Joined by other college presidents, he promoted the Virginia Education Commission, created in 1910.
The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), founded in Williamsburg in 1889, emphasized patriotism in the name of Virginia's 18th-century Founding Fathers.
The site of the exposition would later become, in 1917, the location of the Norfolk Naval Station.
At the same time, heavy shipping traffic made the area a target for U-boats, and a number of merchant vessels were attacked or sunk off the Virginia coast.
This was overturned in 1933.
The Civilian Conservation Corps played a major role in developing that National Park, as well as Pocahontas State Park.
Blacks comprised a third of the population but lost nearly all their political power.
Most of the blacks who remained politically active supported the Byrd organization, which in turn protected their right to vote, making Virginia's race relations the most harmonious in the South before the 1950s, according to V.O. Key.
It brought in many thousands of soldiers and sailors for training.
The Pentagon was built in Arlington as the largest office building in the world.
Turnover was very high—in one three-month period the Newport News shipyard hired 8400 new workers as 8,300 others quit.Charles Johnson, V for Virginia: The Commonwealth Goes to War, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 100 (1992): 365–398 in JSTOR In addition to general postwar growth, the Cold War resulted in further growth in both Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.
Other sites in Northern Virginia included the listening station at Vint Hill.
Virginia also witnessed American efforts in the Space Race.
Langley later oversaw the Viking program to Mars.
The creation of Smith Mountain Lake, Lake Anna, Claytor Lake, Lake Gaston, and Buggs Island Lake, by damming rivers, attracted many retirees and vacationers to those rural areas.
Other new institutions were founded, most notably George Mason University and Liberty University.
Morgan appealed her case up to the Supreme Court and, in 1946, won Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, which struck down segregation interstate buses.
Along with the bus desegregation cases, Virginia was a contestant in the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage, Loving v. Virginia.
Prince Edward County even closed all its public schools in an attempt to avoid racial integration, but relented in the face of U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
By the 1980s, Northern Virginia and the Hampton Roads region had achieved the greatest growth and prosperity, chiefly because of employment related to Federal government agencies and defense, as well as an increase in technology in Northern Virginia.
The recent expansion of government programs in the areas near Washington has profoundly affected the economy of Northern Virginia whose population has experienced large growth and great ethnic/ cultural diversification, exemplified by communities such as Tysons Corner, Reston and dense, urban Arlington.
The Hampton Roads region has also experienced much growth, as have the western suburbs of Richmond in both Henrico and Chesterfield Counties.
Internet and other communications companies clustered in the Dulles Corridor.
While short-lived, The Source was one of the first online service providers alongside CompuServe.
AOL became the largest provider of Internet access during the Dial-up era of Internet access.
In 2007 Virginia speedily passed the nation's first spaceflight act by a vote of 99–0 in the House of Delegates.
Virginia was targeted in the September 11, 2001 attacks, as American Airlines Flight 77 was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington County.