The Old Dominion

The Old Dominion is Mary Johnston‘s interpretive portrait of Virginia, tracing the colony and commonwealth from the precarious Jamestown settlement through the making of a distinctive political, social, and imaginative culture. Written with the narrative assurance of a historical novelist, it combines archival-minded exposition with evocative description, turning governors, planters, rebels, enslaved people, and frontier figures into actors within a broad civic drama. Its style belongs to the Progressive-era tradition of popular history, yet it is enriched by Johnston‘s literary instinct for scene, atmosphere, and moral tension. Mary Johnston, born in Virginia in 1870, was already celebrated for historical romances such as To Have and to Hold when she wrote about her native state. Her upbringing among Virginia landscapes and legends, her fascination with colonial and Revolutionary memory, and her later commitments to reform and women‘s rights all inform her historical imagination. She writes as both inheritor and critic of regional tradition, alert to grandeur, conflict, and contradiction. This book is recommended to readers interested in Virginia history, Southern memory, and the borderland between literature and historical writing. Johnston offers not merely a chronicle, but a cultivated meditation on place, power, and identity.