Scholars and arm-chair historians of eighteenth-century America will take great pleasure in reading this exceptionally well-researched slice of colonial history. In The Baylors of Newmarket, author Thomas Katheder has meticulously researched one of the wealthiest and most socially prominent yet least known families in colonial Virginia. Drawing on mostly unpublished sources, including British and French archives and Virginia court documents, The Baylors of Newmarket is the fascinating and tragic story of Col. John Baylor III and his son John IV, including Col. Baylor's relentless pursuit of equine perfection and his son's delusional quest for the perfect Virginia mansion. The Baylors of Newmarket places the family in the larger context of a pre-Revolutionary Anglo-Virginian elite that sought to emulate the British gentry in culture, education, books and reading, dress, furnishings, and behavior. After the Revolution, the Baylors struggled to maintain what was becoming an increasingly outmoded lifestyle. This extensively referenced history also describes in rich detail the library begun by Col. Baylor III and expanded by his son John IV within the context of a strong book culture among the pre-Revolutionary Virginia gentry that has been largely underappreciated by scholars.

Overshadowed in the popular imagination by the figure of Oliver Cromwell, historians are increasingly coming to recognize the importance of Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron, in shaping the momentous events of mid-seventeenth-century Britain. As both a military and political figure he played a central role in first defeating Charles I and then later supporting the restoration of his son in 1660. England’s Fortress shines new light on this significant yet surprisingly understudied figure through a selection of essays addressing a wide range of topics, from military history to poetry. Divided into two sections, the volume reflects key aspects of Fairfax’s life and career which are, nevertheless, as interconnecting as they are discrete: Fairfax the soldier and statesman, and Fairfax the husband, horseman and scholar. This fresh account of Fairfax’s reputations and legacy questions assumptions about neatly demarcated seventeenth-century chronological, geographic and cultural boundaries. What emerges is a man who subverts as much as he reinforces assumed characteristics of martial invincibility, political disengagement and literary dilettantism.