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This article utilizes the Pocahontas coalfields in West Virginia and the Indian River Farms Company settlement of Vero Beach Florida as case studies of settler memory. As late as the nineteenth century, setters considered these two very different, but connected, Southern spaces as frontiers. Settlers in both places constructed fantasies about Native peoples that focused primarily on the idea of the Native woman Pocahontas. These are imaginative creations that both attempt to create a settlement and to hearken back to fantasies of the past that never fully existed. With selective constructions of memory, both settlements chose Pocahontas because the name evoked a settler dream of the good Indian yielding to conquest, just as they sought a pliant and willing landscape that would yield mineral and agricultural riches. In fact, both places have longer and deeper Native histories that settler and booster histories have obfuscated and hidden in favor of more "romantic" national narratives such as the Pocahontas myth, in order to sell a place and a product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a chronology of the events that led to the establishment of the state of West Virginia between 1861 and 1863. It describes how citizens in western Virginia mobilized in an effort to become an autonomous state following a decision by the Commonwealth of Virginia to secede from the U.S. in 1861, discusses the declaration of independence issued by separatists at the Second Wheeling Convention in the summer of 1861, and explores the role of lawyer Peter Gordon Van Winkle in the West Virginia Constitutional Convention. It also examines several topics which were debated at the West Virginia Constitution Convention including the state name, the electoral process and establishment of voting districts, and taxation for slaveholders.

The article presents a study on the role of the press in the U.S. public sphere by using the evolution of the views of publisher W. E. "Ned" Chilton III on race issues during his career at "The Charleston Gazette" in West Virginia in 1953-1984. Topics include the establishment of Kerner Commission to examine the cause of race riots in 1967, the connection of race and slavery issue on the state's formation and Chilton's appointment of reporter K. W. Lee to cover civil rights and race issues.

Highlights the creation of the State of West Virginia and the contribution of President Abraham Lincoln. Discussion on the secessionist impulse; Reorganized government of Virginia; Constitutional issues; Lincoln as a decision maker.

The article presents information on a series of oral history about the Staunton-Parkersburg Turnpike in West Virginia.