Robert Beverley, Jr.

Robert Beverley (* 1673-1678 in Middlesex County, Virginia; † August 26, 1726 in Westover, Virginia ) was a planter and historian in the English colony of Virginia.

Life and work

He was the son of the plantation owner, Robert Beverley, Sr. and his second wife Mary. Little is known about his early years; apparently he was sent to school in England. In 1696 he married, back in Virginia, Ursula Byrd, sister of William Byrd I, one of the richest landowners of the colony. From 1696 he was sent in 1699 even writers of the House of Burgesses, the House of Representatives of the Virginia colony, and was as a Member of the Jamestown Settlement in these laws chamber. After 1705 he lost to intrigue against the Royal Governor Francis Nicholson to political influence.

In 1703 he went to London to the Privy Council to call in a case. Perhaps already on the crossing to England, he began working on a book on the history of Virginia. The result was published anonymously in 1705 (or purporting to be from " an Indian " (by an Indian ) written ) under the title The History and Present State of Virginia in London. In the second, heavily revised English edition of 1722, he expressed in his preface that he had taken his work in attack to rectify the numerous errors in the manuscript of John Oldmixons British Colonies in America (published in 1708) and circulating to the numerous in England prejudices to refute over the American colonies. The first of the four "books" or better chapter describes the history of the colonization of Virginia's history of the "lost colony " on Roanoke Iceland about the founding of Jamestown by John Smith, whose dalliance with the chief's daughter Pocahontas through to Bacon's Rebellion. The second book deals with the natural resources of Virginia, the third and the fourth, the Indians finally the "current state" of the colony.

Beverley 's work proved particularly popular in France; a first translation appeared in 1707, three more French editions followed until 1718. In the USA, the work almost forgotten and moved only in 1947 by a concerned by LB Wright new issue again to the attention of historians and literary scholars. Today, it is next to the History of the Dividing Line Run in the Year 1728 of his brother William Byrd II as a masterpiece of colonial American history outside of New England. Variously been advised of the specific qualities of American History, as to the fact that Beverley faces in the preface to the English and French historiography and equally rejects; his style model he described as oriented to the Indian way of thinking. Also practiced Beverley sharp criticism of the British colonial administration.

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