Jamestown

Jamestown often refers to:

Jamestown may also refer to:

Places

Australia

Barbados

Canada

Ghana

Ireland

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New Zealand

Saint Kitts and Nevis

South Africa

United Kingdom

Vacation

A vacation or holiday is a leave of absence from a regular occupation, or a specific trip or journey, usually for the purpose of recreation or tourism. People often take a vacation during specific holiday observances, or for specific festivals or celebrations. Vacations are often spent with friends or family.

A person may take a longer break from work, such as a sabbatical, gap year, or career break.

The concept of taking a vacation is a recent invention, and has developed through the last two centuries. Historically, the idea of travel for recreation was a luxury that only wealthy people could afford (see Grand Tour). In the Puritan culture of early America, taking a break from work for reasons other than weekly observance of the Sabbath was frowned upon. However, the modern concept of vacation was led by a later religious movement encouraging spiritual retreat and recreation. The notion of breaking from work periodically took root among the middle and working class.

Etymology

In the United Kingdom, vacation once specifically referred to the long summer break taken by the law courts and then later the term was applied to universities. The custom was introduced by William the Conqueror from Normandy where it facilitated the grape harvest. In the past, many upper-class families moved to a summer home for part of the year, leaving their usual home vacant.

Jamestown Settlement

Jamestown Settlement is a living history museum operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is located near the site of Jamestown, the first successful English settlement on the mainland of North America, founded on May 14, 1607.

Created for the 350th anniversary celebration in 1957 as Jamestown Festival Park, today Jamestown Settlement includes a recreation of the James Fort ca. 1610 to 1614, and a Powhatan Indian Village, indoor and outdoor displays, and replicas of the original settler's ships, the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and the Discovery.

The museum is adjacent and complementary to Historic Jamestowne on Jamestown Island, which is the actual historic and archaeological site where the first settlers landed and lived that is run by the National Park Service and Preservation Virginia. Both sites at Jamestown are linked by the bucolic Colonial Parkway with the other two points of Virginia's Historic Triangle, Colonial Williamsburg, and Yorktown.

Background

Late in the 19th century, Jamestown became the focus of renewed historical interest and efforts at preservation. In 1893, a portion of the island was donated to Preservation Virginia (formerly known as The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities) for that purpose. The actual location of the 1607 fort was thought to be underwater, lost to erosion. A seawall was constructed, which preserved the site where the remains of the original "James Fort" were to be discovered by archaeologists of the Jamestown Rediscovery project beginning in 1994, a century later.

Colonial Williamsburg

Colonial Williamsburg is a living-history museum and private foundation presenting part of a historic district in the city of Williamsburg, Virginia, USA. Colonial Williamsburg's 301-acre (122 ha) Historic Area includes buildings from the eighteenth century (during part of which the city was the capital of Colonial Virginia), as well as 17th-century, 19th-century, Colonial Revival structures and more recent reconstructions. The Historic Area is an interpretation of a colonial American city, with exhibits of dozens of restored or re-created buildings related to its colonial and American Revolutionary War history.

In the late 1920s, the restoration and re-creation of colonial Williamsburg was championed by the Reverend Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin, other community leaders, such organizations as the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (now called Preservation Virginia), the Colonial Dames, the Daughters of the Confederacy, and the Chamber of Commerce as well as the scion of the Rockefeller family, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, to celebrate rebel patriots and the early history of the United States.

American Revolution

The American Revolution was a political upheaval that took place between 1765 and 1783 during which colonists in the Thirteen American Colonies rejected the British monarchy and aristocracy, overthrew the authority of Great Britain, and founded the United States of America.

Starting in 1765, members of American colonial society rejected the authority of the British Parliament to tax them without colonial representatives in the government. During the following decade, protests by colonists—known as Patriots—continued to escalate, as in the Boston Tea Party in 1773 during which patriots destroyed a consignment of taxed tea from the Parliament-controlled and favored East India Company. The British responded by imposing punitive laws—the Coercive Acts—on Massachusetts in 1774, following which Patriots in the other colonies rallied behind Massachusetts. In late 1774 the Patriots set up their own alternative government to better coordinate their resistance efforts against Great Britain, while other colonists, known as Loyalists, preferred to remain aligned to the British Crown.