James Horn

Dr. James Horn is the President of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation, affiliated with Preservation Virginia. Previously, he was Vice President of Research and Historical Interpretation at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He has also served as Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Editor of Publications at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William and Mary, and taught for twenty years at the University of Brighton, England, before moving to the US.

Dr. Horn is the author of Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake; A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America, and numerous articles on early America. In addition, he has edited three collections of essays and documents, including the Writings of Captain John Smith for the Library of America. His latest book, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, was published in 2010. He is currently working on a study of the great Indian warrior chief, Opechan-canough, who was the principal leader of resistance to English settlement in Virginia during the colony’s first forty years.

Articles by this Author

A Fateful Experiment at Jamestown, Winter 2020 | Vol. 64, No. 1

The first votes of the fledgling Virginia Assembly in 1619 marked the inception of the most important political development in American history — the rise of democracy.

1619: The Year That Shaped America , Winter 2019 | Vol. 64, No. 1

Four hundred years ago this year, two momentous events happened in Britain’s fledgling colony in Virginia: the New World’s first democratic assembly convened, and an English privateer brought kidnapped Africans to sell as slaves. Such were the conflicted origins of modern America.

Has Roanoke’s Lost Colony Been Found?, Spring 2010 | Vol. 60, No. 1

New ideas—and archaeological evidence—may provide answers to colonial North America’s longest-running mystery.

Jamestown Hangs in the Balance, Winter 2010 | Vol. 59, No. 4

Only by luck and happenstance did Britain’s first permanent settlement in the New World survive.

Why Jamestown Matters, Winter 2008 | Vol. 58, No. 1

If the colony had collapsed, England might not have been established as the major colonial power in North America.

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