Cradle of America: Four Centuries of Virginia History * Peter Wallenstein * Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007 * xviii, 476 pp. * $29.95.
Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007 * Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. KoIp, Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and William G. Shade * Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007 * xiv, 398 pp. * $29.95.
These welcome narrative histories of Virginia are occasioned by the commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the English settlement at Jamestown, and they will serve as useful legacies of it. More important, time and new scholarship have outdated Virginius Dabney's Virginia: The New Dominion (1971), the …