The Virginia Venture

The Virginia Venture is an innovative exploration of how a wider public of women, children, and men across English society contributed to the foundation of the first permanent English colony in America: Jamestown, Virginia. Drawing on sources from dozens of archives in the United States and England, it provides a fresh perspective on how capital and labor were mobilized to help build the colony—not from the perspective of elite investors alone, but from the point of view of ordinary people across the country. Women and the laboring poor have been overlooked in these efforts: The Virginia Venture brings them center stage. As well as exploring how society at home supported colonization, the book examines the impact that colonization had on English society, including changes in attitudes and behaviors—from the provision of poor relief to domestic tobacco cultivation. The book shows that as English society became more tightly invested in colonization in America, this sparked contestations over the prioritization of “English” and “American” interests. English social history in the seventeenth century cannot be understood without this imperial perspective. The Virginia Venture is essential reading for scholars of English social and imperial history and early American history. It draws on the methods of transatlantic history, showing the intimate connections between England and America, but it is deeply rooted in the social history archive of England. It demonstrates how English archives can be used, to their fullest extent, to illuminate this crucial period of American history.

The eighteenth century British book trade marks the beginning of the literary marketplace as we know it. The lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695 brought an end to pre-publication censorship of printed texts and restrictions on the number of printers and presses in Britain. Resisting the standard "rise of the novel" paradigm, Novel Ventures incorporates new research about the fiction marketplace to illuminate early fiction as an eighteenth-century reader or writer might have seen it. Through a consideration of all 475 works of fiction printed over the four decades from 1690 to 1730, including new texts, translations of foreign works, and reprints of older fiction, Leah Orr shows that the genre was much more diverse and innovative in this period than is usually thought. Contextual chapters examine topics such as the portrayal of early fiction in literary history, the canonization of fiction, concepts of fiction genres, printers and booksellers, the prices and physical manufacture of books, and advertising strategies to give a more complex picture of the genre in the print culture world of the early eighteenth century. Ultimately, Novel Ventures concludes that publishers had far more influence over what was written, printed, and read than authors did, and that they shaped the development of English fiction at a crucial moment in its literary history.

"I'm tired, and the other pack mules are tired, and from the way you move I imagine that the rest of you donkeys are tired!" called out Jack Ridsdale, as the last of the mules and their drivers scrambled up the bank and gained a secure foothold on the little plateau. "I move that we camp here for the night. All in favor say 'aye.' The motion's carried unanimously." With that the tall boy threw off the pack that burdened his shoulders, set his gun up against a friendly tree and proceeded in other ways to relieve himself of the restraints under which he had toiled up the steep mountain side since early morning, with only now and then a minute's pause for breath. "This is a good place to camp in," he presently added. "There's grazing for the mules, there's timber around for fire wood and I hear water trickling down from the cliff yonder. So 'Alabama,' which is Cherokee eloquence meaning 'here we rest.'" The party consisted of five sturdy boys and a man, the Doctor, not nearly so stalwart in appearance, who seemed about twenty-eight or thirty years old. Each member of the party carried a heavy pack upon his back and each had a gun slung over his shoulder and an axe hanging by his girdle. There were four packmules heavily laden and manifestly weary with the long climb up the mountain. As the boys were scarcely less weary than the mules they eagerly welcomed Jack Ridsdale's decision to go no farther that day, but rest where they were for the night. "Now then," Jack resumed as soon as he got his breath again—a thing requiring some effort in the rarefied atmosphere of the high mountain peak—"we're all starved. The first thing to do is to get a fire started and get the kettle on for supper. If some of you fellows will unload the mules and get out the necessary things I'll chop some wood and we'll have a fire going in next to no time." With that he swung his axe over his shoulder and stalked off into the nearby edge of the wood land. There with deft blows—for he was an expert with the axe—he quickly converted some fallen limbs and dead trees into a rude sort of fire wood which the other boys shouldered and carried to the glade where the Doctor had started a little fire that needed only feeding to become a great one. During their laborious climb up the steep mountain side the party had found the early November day rather too warm for comfort; but now that the sun had sunk behind the mountain, and evening was drawing near, there was a sharp feeling of coming frost in the atmosphere, and as it would be necessary to sleep out of doors that night with no shelter but the stars, Jack continued his chopping until a great pile of dry wood lay near the fire ready for use during the night.

In one of the most triumphant high sea stories ever told, Kieran Doherty brings to life the true story of the ship that rescued the Jamestown settlement in 1610 and ensured England's place in the New World. When the Sea Venture left England in 1609, it was flagship in a fleet of nine bound for Jamestown with roughly 600 settlers and badly needed supplies aboard. But after four weeks at sea, as the voyage neared its end, a hurricane devastated the fleet, leaving the Sea Venture shipwrecked on the island of Bermuda. It took Sea Venture's passengers nearly a year and half to reach their destination. Awaiting them was not a thriving colony, but instead the remaining fifty colonists—beleaguered, desperate and hungry. But, the question remains, would the English have lost their place in the New World if the ship never arrived? A story of strife and triumph, but above all, endurance, Sea Venture begins and ends in hope and remains one of the greatest "What Ifs?" in history. With a bravado reminiscent of Patrick O'Brien's legendary sea sagas, Doherty braves the elements, delivering a powerful history willed by a people destined to change the New World forever.

"'The two works reprinted here, inaugurating a projected series of contemporary narratives relating to the settlement of Virginia, have been much discussed as sources of Shakespeare's 'The Tempest.' Both William Strachey and Silvester Jourdain were passengers on the ill-fated 'Sea Venture,' which wrecked in 1609 within sight of one of the Bermuda Islands when this vessel, with eight others in the expedition led by Sir Thomas Gates, was on its way to Jamestown. Aside from their Virginian and Shakespearean interest, the narratives that Strachey and Jourdain wrote are both intrinsically fascinating documents and have a significant place in the voyage literature of their day.' So reads the preface to this first modern-spelling edition of these absorbing accounts. The editor, Louis B. Wright, is Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is author and editor of many book son American and English history and is eminently well qualified to evaluate and present these seventeenth-century writers to a modern audience."--Pg. [4] of cover.

A freshly researched account of the dramatic rescue of the Jamestown settlers The English had long dreamed of colonizing America, especially after Sir Francis Drake brought home Spanish treasure and dramatic tales from his raids in the Caribbean. Ambitions of finding gold and planting a New World colony seemed within reach when in 1606 Thomas Smythe extended overseas trade with the launch of the Virginia Company. But from the beginning the American enterprise was a disaster. Within two years warfare with Indians and dissent among the settlers threatened to destroy Smythe's Jamestown just as it had Raleigh's Roanoke a generation earlier. To rescue the doomed colonists and restore order, the company chose a new leader, Thomas Gates. Nine ships left Plymouth in the summer of 1609—the largest fleet England had ever assembled—and sailed into the teeth of a storm so violent that "it beat all light from Heaven." The inspiration for Shakespeare's The Tempest, the hurricane separated the flagship from the fleet, driving it onto reefs off the coast of Bermuda—a lucky shipwreck (all hands survived) which proved the turning point in the colony's fortune.

Inside the Minds: Leading Deal Makers is the most authoritative book ever written on the "real world aspects" of deal doing, written by an unprecedented collection of leading venture capitalists and lawyers. These highly acclaimed deal makers share their knowledge and experience on negotiations, partnerships, joint ventures, calculating ROI, keeping your deal skills sharp, working as a team, meetings schedules and environment, legal issues, deal parameters and other important topics. An unprecedented look inside the minds of some of the most well known deal makers makes for exciting and highly interesting reading for every financial professional, lawyer, business development professional, CEO, entrepreneur and individual involved in deal making in any environment and at every level.