William Stith compiled this detailed factual history of Virginia by culling material from the Records of the Virginia Company, a manuscript archive that Jefferson later owned and used in his work.

In his Notes on Virginia, Jefferson objected to Stith’s perfunctory sense of history, noting that he was “a man of classical learning, and very exact, but of no taste in style. He is inelegant therefore, and his details often too minute to be tolerable even to a native of the country whose history he writes.”