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The Colony of Virginia was a British colonial settlement in North America from 1606 to 1776. The first effort to create an English settlement in the area was chartered in 1584 and established in 1585; the resulting Roanoke Colony lasted for three attempts totaling six years. In 1590, the colony was abandoned.
The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), by Capt. John Smith, one of the first histories of Virginia. The written history of Virginia begins with documentation by the first Spanish explorers to reach the area in the 16th century, when it was occupied chiefly by Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan peoples.
It existed during the colonial history of the United States when Virginia was a British colony. From 1642 to 1776, the House of Burgesses was an important feature of Virginian politics, alongside the Crown-appointed colonial governor and the Virginia Governor's Council, the upper house of the General Assembly. [1]
In two ways the brief period of the commonwealth in England had a marked effect on the history of Virginia. For the first and only time during the colonial period, Virginia enjoyed absolute self-government. The assembly, governorship, and council were all elective for the time, and the people never forgot this taste of practical independence.
British North America comprised the colonial territories of the British Empire in North America from 1783 onwards. English colonisation of North America began in the 16th century in Newfoundland, then further south at Roanoke and Jamestown, Virginia, and more substantially with the founding of the Thirteen Colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America.
The First Seventeen Years: Virginia, 1607–1624, by Charles E. Hatch Jr. ISBN 0806347392; History of the Virginia Company of London with Letters to and from the First Colony Never Before Printed, by Edward D. Neill, originally published by Joel Munsell, 1869, Albany, New York, reprinted by Brookhaven Press ISBN 1581034016
In all the colonies that later became part of the United States, population growth throughout this period was vigorous, growing from a population of about 25,000 in 1640 to around 75,000 in 1660. The colonies also became more ethnically and religiously diverse. Another effect was the establishment of colonial assemblies in most of the colonies.
Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (Vintage, 2012) Warren M. Billings (Editor), The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1700 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) James Horn, A Land as God Made It (Perseus Books, 2005)