Powhatan's World and Colonial Virginia

by Frederic W. Gleach

Drawing on the latest anthropological studies of colonial encounters, Frederic Gleach offers a more balanced and complete accounting of the early years of the Jamestown colony than has been seen before. When English colonists established their first permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607, they confronted a powerful and growing native chiefdom consisting of over thirty tribes under one paramount chief, Powhatan. For the next half century, a portion of the Middle Atlantic coastal plain became a charged and often violent meeting ground between two very different worlds. Gleach argues that the history of Jamestown is essentially the story of how two cultures civilize and incorporate each other. He examines historical events from both native and colonial perspectives, resulting in original, fuller interpretations of seventeenth-century Virginia history.