Tobacco was life in seventeenth-century Virginia. It defined everything about Chesapeake society–race, class, gender, labor patterns, family life, marriage, religion, economy, and politics. So far I am having a great time teaching Edmund Morgan’s classic American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. (I hope my Colonial America students are enjoying it as well).
Today one of my more inspired students showed-up with some tobacco leaves. He got them from an Amish tobacco grower here in south-central Pennsylvania.
