Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/891

This page needs to be proofread.

America 88 1 historical material relating to the Ephrata Cloister and the Bunkers. The legends and the philosophy of the sect are analyzed, and many facsimiles of manuscripts are given. In the April number of the Virginia Magazine of History and Biog- raphy we find, beside continued articles, the beginning of a systematic list of Virginia newspapers to be found in various public libraries. A beginning is here made with the library of Congress ; the collections of the Virginia Historical Society, the Virginia State Library, etc., will follow. The Virginia Historical Society has performed a highly useful service in issuing, in a pamphlet of 120 pages, a detailed Catalogue of the Manu- scripts in the Collection of the society. It were to be wished that more societies would do this. We understand that it is the intention of the Tennessee Historical Society to do so. ]Ir. W. P. Willey has written An Inside View of the Formation of the State of West Virginia (Wheeling, News Publishing Co.), with character- sketches of the pioneers in that movement. Dr. William E. Dodd, professor of history in Randolph-Macon Col- lege, has been enabled by the liberality of a citizen of Richmond to begin the issue, on behalf of that college, of a series called by the bene- factor's name. The John P. Branch Historical Papers of Randolph- Macon College, intended as an annual publication, to include a prize essay (this year on the famous Rev. Devereux Jarratt), and a variety of orig- inal historical documents. In this first issue Dr. Dodd has reprinted, from pamphlets now out of print, a number of lettefs of Col. Leven Powell and Rev. David Griffith, relating to the Revolutionary war and the election of iSoo in Virginia, the latter treated from the Federalist point of view. No. 2 of the "James Sprunt Historical Monographs," published by the University of North Carolina, is devoted to Nathaniel Macon. First is printed a conscientious and sensible analysis of Macon's Congressional career, by Mr. Edwin Mood Wilson. This is followed by an interesting and characteristic series of his letters, edited with full notes by Professor Kemp P. Battle. There are twenty-three of them, ranging in date from 1796 to 1828. A letter written in 1826 by Willie P. Mangum is added. The pamphlet (pp. 116), though open to some criticism in respect to arrangement, is a contribution of distinct value to political history. In a poem of some length entitled The White Doc (Philadelphia, Lippincott), Mrs. Sallie Southall Cotten, of North Carolina, has embodied all the historical facts and traditional lore connected with the birth of Virginia Dare and the disappearance and supposed survival of Sir Walter Raleigh's lost colony. Mr. William Garrott Brown, of the Library of Harvard Lhiiversity, has written a small history of the state of Alabama in the series of state histories now in course of publication by the University Publishing Company.