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Home > Museum Shop > Books & Media > Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion
  Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion
Price: $35.00
Compiled by Workers of the Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Virginia
The crowning achievement of the New Deal era Federal Writers' Project (1935–1943), known after July 1939 as the Writers' Program, was its American Guide Series of books and pamphlets describing the nation's cities, states, territories, regions, and localities. The Virginia Writers' Program, under the expert supervision of Eudora Ramsay Richardson, contributed several important volumes to this series, the most popular and widely circulated of which was Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion. A team of publicly supported researchers and writers spent three years digging in the collections of the Virginia State Library (now the Library of Virginia) and visiting hundreds of communities across the state gathering material for the book. First published by Oxford University Press in 1940, the Virginia guide is still in great demand more than sixty years later for the wealth of fascinating historical information contained in its pages.
The first section of the guide presents fifteen interpretive essays that range from Douglas Southall Freeman's reflections on the spirit of Virginia to fact-filled analyses of the state's geography, history, population, economy, folk culture, and social life. The second section highlights fifteen of Virginia's largest cities, while the third presents twenty-four detailed tours of the state's major regions and points of interest.
Although perspectives on the past have changed significantly in the years since the Virginia guide first appeared, the same historic sites continue to attract visitors to the Old Dominion in ever-increasing numbers. The modern interstate highway system has superseded many of the routes recommended by the guide, yet the time-tested scenic byways still beckon adventurous and curious travelers. Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion offers the avid voyager and armchair tourist alike a nostalgic sojourn through a Virginia that in many ways is no more—yet also, a Virginia whose enduring tradition and character continue to guide and inspire the future.
The Virginia Center for the Book and the Library of Virginia are pleased to cosponsor a reprint edition of this classic volume, with an insightful new foreword by Garrett Epps.
710 pages, hardcover, ISBN 0884901734, Virginia State Library and Archives, 1992 (originally 1940).
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