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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.