Paper #1
The Founding of Virginia: Myth and Reality
(due March 27)

We have a number of myths about the founding of America: (1) that everyone came here for religious freedom, (2) that the earliest settlers came from the middle levels of English society and arrived with families,  (3) that America was the land of opportunity where the class system of England was forgotten and everyone had a chance to make it with perseverance and hard work, and (4) that settlers left their English laws and customs behind and built a new, unique, and just legal system in the America wilderness.  Like all national myths, there is often some truth in these statements but also possibly much untruth.

As we will see this semester, the American colonies were not alike; they were founded for different reasons, settled by dissimilar peoples, they established somewhat different governmental and legal systems, and each reacted to a unique set of environmental, economic, and social factors.  Virginia is one of those unique places and while it has much in common with other colonies around the Chesapeake (Maryland, Delaware, and parts of North Carolina), it has its own particular story to tell us about the founding of America.

Your job in this short, 4-5 page, paper will be to evaluate the American "myths" above as they relate to the founding of Virginia.  Your guide in this endeavor will be the book Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia by John Ruston Pagan.  The book is a compelling true story of poverty and wealth, self-made men and women, powerful planters and powerless servants and slaves, just and not-so-just individuals, and how societies are built by such men and women.  Do the stories of these individuals and the society they tried to create in mid-17^th century Virginia confirm or deny these American myths?  How do these myths hold up to historical analysis when applied to colonial Virginia? Do these myths fit or not fit 17^th century Virginia?

The paper should begin with an introductory paragraph or two which makes clear to the reader what you propose to investigate and how you propose to do so. What will you confirm and what will you deny?  What position will you take on these issues?  What is your argument?  Which of the myths above fit this story of early Virginia and which ones do not?  Use examples from the lives of the many individuals highlighted in the Pagan book to support your position (Anne Orthwood, William and John Kendall, William Waters, etc.)  There is no completely right or completely wrong answer so do the best you can to assess these myths as they relate to Virginia.  The paper should also contain footnotes indicating the source of material used (mostly the Pagan book but also possibly the Foner textbook or the Brown reader; external web sources are inappropriate and unnecessary for this assignment).  If direct quotations are used, they should be surrounded by quotation marks [" "]. Please do not over-quote the paper should be primarily your words. Quotations and specific references to information from these books must be referenced with a footnote indicating the location of the information. Paper should be double spaced in 10-12 point type.

Use the Footnote function in MS Word (or other word processing package) to produce a superscripted reference number at the end of the appropriate sentence or paragraph of the paper and the citation at the bottom of the page, such as:

¹John Ruston Pagan, Anne Orthwood's Bastard: Sex and Law in Early Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 19.

²Pagan, 35.

³Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty: An American History, Volume 1, 5th edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017), 46.

⁴Pagan, 103.

⁵Foner, 22-23.