Pioneers of the Old South

Pioneers of the Old South: A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings is a 1918 historical study by Mary Johnston (1870-1936), the Virginia novelist, written for the Chronicles of America series published by Yale University Press. The volume narrates the founding era of the Southern colonies: Jamestown and the Virginia Company, the tobacco economy and the coming of African slavery, Bacon’s Rebellion, the proprietary settlements of Maryland and the Carolinas, and the emergence of the plantation South to the early eighteenth century. Johnston brought a novelist’s narrative gift to the assignment, and the volume stands apart in the series for its prose. The book documents how the founding of the South was presented to general American readers in the 1910s. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.