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Archaeological discoveries in the Mediterranean region in the 18th and early 19th centuries helped to promote in both England and the American republic a more historical approach to architecture. Roman sources were used initially, as at Thomas Jefferson's Capitol at Richmond, the first American work based on a specific classical building (a Roman temple in France). The Greek style, however, aroused the most interest. Ancient Greece appealed powerfully to the imagination as a place far away both geographically and in time. As the source of western civilization, it appealed also by association. In the early 1800s Greece was controlled by the Turks, but the Greek War of Independence (1821-29) later fueled interest in the style as one appropriate for a democracy. Greek architecture was not actually "revived" in America and Virginia, in that no Greek buildings were reproduced in their entirety. Rather, the decorative elements of Greek architecture were employed in new ways, as seen in the several examples presented here.