The VMHC's Reynolds Business History Center staff has compiled a list of online resources and a basic bibliography for researching Virginia business and economic history.

Online resources

Here are a few online resources that may be useful during your research:

• Hagley Museum & Library, Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society: www.hagley.lib.de.us/center.html
• Historical currency conversion tool: http://futureboy.homeip.net/fsp/dollar.fsp
• Historical purchasing power tool: www.measuringworth.com/ppowerus/
• Library of Congress, Business Reference Services: www.loc.gov/rr/business/
• Virginia Tech Libraries, Manuscript Sources for Railroad History: http://spec.lib.vt.edu/railroad/rrintro.htm

Bibliography

• Adams, Sean Patrick. Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

• Breen, T. H. Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

• Cross, Malcolm A. Dan River Runs Deep: An Informal History of a Major Textile Company, 1950–81. New York: The Total Book, 1982.

• Dew, Charles B. Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

• ———. Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.

• Fogel, Robert William and Stanley L. Engerman. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974.

• Fox, William A. Always Good Ships: Histories of Newport News Ships. Norfolk: Donning Company, 1986.

• Gibson, Langhorne, Jr. Cabell's Canal: The Story of the James River and Kanawha. Richmond: Commodore Press, 2000.

• Kulikoff, Allan. Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

• Levengood, Paul A. Virginia: Catalyst of Commerce for Four Centuries. Richmond: Virginia Chamber of Commerce, 2007.

• Lindgren, James M. "'First and Foremost a Virginian': Joseph Bryan and the New South Economy." Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 96 (1988): 157–80.

• Majewski, John. A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia Before the Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

• Noe, Kenneth W. Southwest Virginia's Railroad: Modernization and the Sectional Crisis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

• Oden, Michael, Laura Wolf-Powers, and Ann Markusen. "Post Cold War Conversion: Gains, Losses and Hidden Changes in the U.S. Economy." Essay in America's Peace Dividend, Columbia International Affairs Online, December 2000.

• Ragsdale, Bruce A. A Planters' Republic: The Search for Economic Independence in Revolutionary Virginia. Madison, Wisc.: Madison House, 1996.

• Ransom, Roger L. and Richard Sutch. One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (2d ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

• Robert, Joseph C. Ethyl: A History of the Corporation and the People who Made It. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983.

• Shifflett, Crandall A. Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880–1960. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991.

• Siegel, Frederick F. The Roots of Southern Distinctiveness: Tobacco and Society in Danville, Virginia, 1780–1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

• Smith, Solomon K. "Industrial Activities in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, and the Use of Slavery Therein." MA thesis, Virginia Commonwealth University, 2000.

• Smith, Robert Sidney. Mill on the Dan: A History of Dan River Mills, 1882–1950. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1960.

• Stover, John F. The Railroads of the South, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955.

• Striplin, E. F. The Norfolk & Western: A History. Roanoke, Va.: Norfolk & Western Railway Co., 1981.

• Troutman. Phillip D. "Geographies of Family and Market: Virginia's Domestic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century." University of Virginia Library Geospatial and Statistical Datat Center, Spring 1998.

• Virginia Business, 1986–2006.

• Wright, Gavin. Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

• Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, University of Virginia. "Virginia Statistical Abstract, Section 16, Population. Urban and Rural Population of Virginia, 1790–2000,” 2005.