At the Falls: Richmond, Virginia, and Its People

By Marie Tyler-McGraw

Book Overview

In this richly illustrated book, Marie Tyler-McGraw presents almost 400 years of Richmond's history, covering a rich and complex past that stretches from Powhatan's encounter with English adventurers to the inauguration of attorney Douglas Wilder as the nation's first elected African American governor.

Lying at the fall line of the James River, Richmond was a transshipment point for the products of colonial plantation agriculture, an important slave market, and an early center of southern industrialization. More so than for most cities, the history of Richmond is a national history. Three times it has been at the center of the American story: as the westernmost area reached by explorers heading upriver from the Jamestown settlement; as the capital of the Confederacy and the site of the defeated South's memorialization of itself; and as a center of massive resistance to school desegregation in the 1950s.

Tyler-McGraw brings these and many other moments of high drama to life in a compelling story that moves beyond the city's entrepreneurs and politicians to incorporate the lives of those who also played a central part in Richmond's history, including African Americans, women of all races, and the city's workers.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807821632
• ISBN13: 9780807821633
• Release Date: December 1994
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 3.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A True History of Richmond

Most books about Richmond have focused on what we call the "great and good", that is the powerful families who have traditionally dominated the city. Tyler- McGraw, however, chooses to concentrate on the history of the ordinary people of Richmond - working class whites as well as African Americans and woman, who are almost completely forgotten by the official historians of the previous generations. As someone connected to the city by family ties and who is intimately familiar with the place Tyler - McGraw's history rings true to me and much more than any other book I've seen about Richmond it reflects the history of my own family and of the Richmond I know. A good book, highly recommended.