American author THOMAS NELSON PAGE (1853-1922), of the Nelson and Page "First Families" of Virginia, popularized the "plantation tradition" of Southern literature, idealizing the slavery-era South in such short story collections as In Ole Virginia (1887) and The Burial of the Guns (1894). But he also wrote nonfiction of the same tenor, such as this 1892 collection of essays, which he hoped might "serve to help awaken inquiry into the true history of the Southern people and may aid in dispelling the misapprehension under which the Old South has lain so long." This replica of that original collection offers invaluable insight into a mindset that has not fully been abandoned today, even more than a century later. Here, Nelson Page offers his proudly antebellum attitudes on: • "The Old South" • "Authorship in the South Before the War" • "Glimpses of Life in Colonial Virginia" • "Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War" • "Two Old Colonial Places" • "The Old Virginia Lawyer" • "The...