"Dan Frost shows how, inspired by the idea of progress, these men set about transforming Southern higher education. Recognizing the north's superiority in industry and technology, they turned their own schools from a classical orientation to a new emphasis on science and engineering. These educators came to define the Southern idea of progress and passed it on to their students, thus helping to create and perpetuate an expectation for the arrival of the New South."--BOOK JACKET.

Contents.--pt. 1. Titles of books in the Virginia State Library which relate to Virginia and Virginians, the titles of those books written by Virginians, and of those printed in Virginia, but not including ... published official documents.--pt. 2. Titles of the printed official documents of the Commonwealth, 1776-1916.--pt. 3. The Acts and Journals of the General Assembly of the Colony, 1619-1776.--pt. 4. Three series of sessional documents of the House of Delegates: ... January 7-April 4, 1861 ... September 15-October 6, 1862; and .. January 7-March 31, 1863.--pt. 5. Titles of the printed documents of the Commonwealth, 1916-1925.

Challenging the popular conception of Southern youth on the eve of the Civil War as intellectually lazy, violent, and dissipated, Peter S. Carmichael looks closely at the lives of more than one hundred young white men from Virginia's last generation to grow up with the institution of slavery. He finds them deeply engaged in the political, economic, and cultural forces of their time. Age, he concludes, created special concerns for young men who spent their formative years in the 1850s. Before the Civil War, these young men thought long and hard about Virginia's place as a progressive slave society. They vigorously lobbied for disunion despite opposition from their elders, then served as officers in the Army of Northern Virginia as frontline negotiators with the nonslaveholding rank and file. After the war, however, they quickly shed their Confederate radicalism to pursue the political goals of home rule and New South economic development and reconciliation. Not until the turn of the century, when these men were nearing the ends of their lives, did the mythmaking and storytelling begin, and members of the last generation recast themselves once more as unreconstructed Rebels. By examining the lives of members of this generation on personal as well as generational and cultural levels, Carmichael sheds new light on the formation and reformation of Southern identity during the turbulent last half of the nineteenth century.