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In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Rhys Isaac describes and analyzes the dramatic confrontations--primarily religious and political--that transformed Virginia in the second half of the eighteenth century. Making use of the observational techniques of the cultural anthropologist, Isaac vividly recreates and painstakingly dissects a society in the turmoil of profound inner change.

Rhys Isaac (1937-2010) was Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and Emeritus Professor of History at LaTrobe University in Australia.

"One of the best--and most provocative--books written on colonial Anglo-America over the past decade, it must be the starting point for all further work on the subject. Equally important, [Isaac's] efforts to demonstrate how historians can profitably employ some of the tools of symbolic anthropologists . . . deserve close inspection."
--Times Literary Supplement

"[A] gracefully written evocation of eighteenth-century Virginia culture. . . . The book convinces us that close attention to commonplace events and their settings by someone of Isaac's ability will give us fresh access to long lost worlds."
--American Historical Review