Customer Reviews

Creating Colonial Williamsburg: The Restoration of Virginia's Eighteenth-Century Capital, Second Edition

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was quite disappointed by this book. I was hoping to read an account of how this amazing project was accomplished on a practical level -- how did people react to suddenly learning that their street was being turned into a living museum? What was the legal mechanism? When I visited many years ago, there was still a Victorian house stuck right in the middle of the historic area -- who were the people living there, and why didn't they cooperate? How did they react to spending decades living in the middle of a museum? The book makes some references to the decision to ban traffic, but never says how the decision was made, how the residents felt about it, how it was implemented. The same for desegregation of the facilities, which are mentioned in passing but not discussed at any length. So many interesting stories have been left untold. Much of this book consists of excerpts from editorials over the years discussing the significance of Williamsburg, and there are many excerpts from letters written by visitors to the museum describing their reaction to the visit. The author also makes some wild generalizations about the museum, for example, something to the effect that Williamsburg was a major force in the Cold War, which I felt were quite unsupported. It read more like an extended term paper in a sociology class than a history of the museum.