ASSISTANT PROFESSOR of History of History John C. Coombs, who joined the faculty in the fall, has as the focus of his research the early Chesapeake, particularly colonial Virginia. He is currently finishing revisions for his first book, The Rise of Virginia Slavery, 1630-1730, which has been accepted for publication by the University of Virginia Press. The study offers a major reassessment of the timing and character of the colony’s conversion from white to black labor and the role that pivotal transition played in the emergence of a dominant class of gentry planters and the formation of African- American society.

While completing work on the manuscript, Coombs has presented papers at several conferences. In 2005 he delivered a paper on 17th-century commercial connections between the Chesapeake and Caribbean at the tenth anniversary conference of the Harvard International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, and in 2006 he co-authored, with Dr. J. Elliott Russo, a paper for the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association that analyzed the development of slavery in non-tobacco growing areas of early Virginia and Maryland. In November of 2007 he participated in a panel discussion of new directions in Virginia history at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting in Richmond.

Since meeting Douglas Bradburn of the State University of New York at Binghamton at a session of the Harvard Seminar held in Cambridge, England, in 2004, Coombs and Bradburn have engaged in a number of joint academic endeavors. Th eir co-authored article “Smoke and Mirrors: Reinterpreting the Society and Economy of the Seventeenth- Century Chesapeake” appeared in the October 2006 issue of Atlantic Studies, an international journal publishing research and debate on historical, cultural, and literary issues arising within the new field of Atlantic history.

They are also co-editing a volume for the University of Virginia Press entitled Early Modern Virginia: New Essays on the Old Dominion, which will feature recent research by junior and mid-career scholars working on 17th-century Virginia. As part of the volume’s production, last August they hosted an academic symposium on early Virginia history at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville. Jointly funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Hampden-Sydney College, SUNY Binghamton, and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Rockefeller Library, the symposium brought together multiple generations of Chesapeake scholars to critique the essays that will appear in the volume and included a public roundtable discussion of Virginia’s 400th anniversary.

Coombs has also remained actively engaged in historical archaeology. Since 2004 he has been involved with the Comparative Archæological Study of Colonial Chesapeake Culture, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, a project which has made available on the Internet site plans and artifact inventories for eighteen Virginia and Maryland archaeological sites spanning the period circa 1620 through the mid-18th century. Last January 1620 through the mid-18th century. Last January he delivered a paper on the material dimensions of slavery in early Virginia at the annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Williamsburg, and he continues to serve as a consultant for the ongoing excavation of George Washington’s Ferry Farm in Fredericksburg.

Coombs received his bachelor of arts degree from Arizona State University and his doctorate from the College of William and Mary.

BEYOND THE Classroom FOR THE Classroom
Hampden-Sydney College Faculty Scholarship 2005-2008
A report by the Office of the Dean of the Faculty