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Isaac, Rhys.  The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790. Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg VA, by University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
 

Through a series of essays, Isaac traces the changing views of religious and political thought, and therefore, the meaning of life in the latter half of 18th century Virginia. Using historical sources such as diaries, 18th century newspapers, religious papers and legal statutes, Isaac reconstructs the colonial Virginian mentality.  He does so methodically.  Beginning with Robert Beverly’s written perception of the 1705 Virginian landscape (that being though bountiful, Virginia should be improved upon), Isaac contrasts this to the 1724 account by Hugh Jones.  (Here the landscape is seen as working colony, complete with homes, churches, and courthouses and institutionalized English law.)  Claiming that a society “leaves marks of use upon the terrain (or living space) it occupies” which display relations of the society to the environment, as well as the distribution and control of access to resources and social relations [19], Isaac deciphers these marks to reveal the perceptions of the common folk, the slaves, and the Virginian gentry.  He describes the various Virginians’ houses, buildings, religious ceremonies, taverns and even cockfights, often as they relate to the perceived environment and to each other.  In the latter half of the book, Isaac describes the political revolutionary uprising as viewed in Virginia.  Along with this uprising, the evangelical Methodist and then Baptist movements furthered altered the society’s “terrain” and Isaac conveys the changes mainly through altered building plans and new perceptions of space.  A final chapter discusses his systematic method of analysis-- that of an ethnographic historian.  Relating his main concern, "Action," to “understanding life as it was experienced by ‘actors’ on past ‘stages,’” he stresses that the aim of analysis of any researcher is to display a “persuasive reconstruction of the experiences of past actors.”  In other words, it is to give an “effective performance” [357]. [J. Hembree]