I had been teaching for one year at the University of Virginia history department in the fall of 1979, when Theodore Caplow, a sociology professor, asked me to serve as an officer of his recently-created Tocqueville Society. Although the society had just published its first issue of the Tocqueville Review, it was distinct from it. In 1992, I joined the newly-formed editorial board which Henri Mendras created upon taking over the editorship.
William and Mary Quarterly recently initiated an origins debate concerning settler colonialism in America in their discussion of the applicability of that framework to early America. Settler colonialism is a type of colonialism, specifically characterized as dispossession of indigenous people of their land. In respect to British North America, the beginnings of settler colonialism originate in Virginia, where British colonists came into conflict with native people over land not long after their arrival.
English Politics in Early Virginia History
