Just for fun: Go to the New York Times online and punch “George Pickett” into the search engine there. What you’ll find is Encyclopedia Virginia’s entry on the famous Confederate general. The Times has begun to syndicate our content, beginning with Pickett, in their Times Topic series. The goal for the Timesis to have such articles provide background knowledge and context for links to archived Times articles. The benefit to EV is having the Times imprimatur on content that we already knew was scholarly but accessible and just generally top-notch. Here’s an example of an article that covers the entire Civil War. Or here is William McKinley, an article written by folks at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.

IMAGE: George Pickett

Ta-Nehisi Coates, after watching one of David Blight’s free online seminars on slavery and the Civil War, wonders about the economics of bondage. In particular, he asks his readers to explain why Southerners believed, before the war, that slavery would die if it weren’t allowed to expand into new U.S. territories.

My basic read is that it’s a supply and demand problem. If slavery can’t expand, and slaves keep reproducing (as they were in the South) you’ll end up with a glut of slaves in a small area, thus causing the price of slaves to fall. I have two questions. 1.) Does my read sound right? 2.) Why would the falling price of slaves be bad for the South? Wouldn’t that be good, in that it would require even less investment in labor?

For a fascinating lesson in economics and history, read through the comments. Here are some highlights:

He must be talking about the price to slaveowners of keeping slaves. If you have a finite plantation that can only grow X plants, then you only need Y able-bodied slaves at any given time. If your slaves keep reproducing and do so at a faster rate than they die, and you can’t sell them to other plantations because they’re no longer needed, then you could definitely reach the point where you were losing money on your farm . . .

. . . When local markets collapsed, slave owners lost wealth and the ability to access capital (by selling a few slaves). Slaves had to be kept at a slight supply shortage to retain value . . .

. . . Is the basic idea that you need to be able to sell slaves to generate cash if, say, you have a bad crop one year? And if slaves are cheap, you can’t really do that? It almost sounds like they were labor and insurance . . .

. . . To some extent, that’s right. Slaves were both labor and capital. That makes modeling the economics extremely difficult.

But the idea is that you spent $x for a slave, but if the resale value was $(x-n), then you lost money on your investment unless the added value of their labor was greater than $n. If the resale value dropped further, faster, then it was impossible to recoup the lost value through labor . . .

. . . A lot of plantations actually made more money selling slaves than they did selling the crops they produced, particularly in the old Confederacy (Virginia and the Carolinas) that were not particularly suited to growing cotton. (Wise old Ben Franklin even suspected that Jefferson’s opposition to the trans-Atlantic slave trade was motivated by a desire to increase the value of the slaves that were already here, thereby enhancing the wealth of the slaveowners). So it was very important to maintain a growing demand for slaves in order to keep their value up . . .

IMAGE: Slaves Waiting for Sale; Richmond, Virginia, 1861 by the English artist Eyre Crowe. Published in Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Menil Foundation, Harvard University Press, 1989), vol. 4, pt. 1, p. 205, fig. 127; original painting is held privately. Reprinted courtesy of www.slaveryimages.org, sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the University of Virginia Library.

Eleanor Ross Taylor is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for her collection Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008. From our entry:

Taylor’s poetry is most often compared to that of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. “[O]f course I loved Emily Dickinson and read a lot of Emily Dickinson early,” Taylor remarked in 2002 interview with Blackbird, “but the first poet that really made me feel that poetry was contemporary and could relate to me right now, in the way that you know that all those wonderful heroines of poetry and heroes do, was Edna St. Vincent Millay. I read her as a teenager in school and just fell in love with her poems. I think it gave me a feeling of being able to approach current, everyday life.” The southernness of her background makes her tend to rein in her formidable intellect and biting wit with an uneasy deference to form and convention.

The awards will be announced in March.

IMAGE: Eleanor Ross Taylor, by Tom Victor (1999); courtesy of Louisiana State University Press

I love it when the New York Times uses big words like crepuscular, as in the “strange crepuscular tradition” of some black-clad dude visiting Edgar Allan Poe’s graveside every year on his birthday—which was yesterday—bearing three red roses and a bottle of Cognac. The tradition goes back to 1949, apparently.

But the visitor—whose identity, or identities, has never been revealed, despite some claims to the contrary over the years—failed to show up this year for the first time, ending a strange crepuscular tradition and disappointing a crowd of more than 30 people who forfeited a good night’s sleep to witness the visitation.

That’s too bad . . . now back to crepuscular. It means “relating to the twilight,” but its consonants are too jagged and sharp for anything that’s, you know, just pretty. For instance, Thelonious Monk has a great & lovely tune called “Crepuscule with Nellie,” written for his wife. But no one has ever accused Monk of being just pretty. The man’s playing was all sharp edges—making it that much more odd that his middle name was Sphere.

Anyway, Baudelaire dug this sort of ambiguity, too, and he began his poem “Le Crépuscule du soir” with a reference to the “charming, friendly evening of the criminal” (or “Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel”). You can find the rest here, but basically it reads like a stern warning to impatient lovers. For instance, the type of lovers to lose a night’s sleep over some dude with roses & Cognac.

IMAGE: Thelonious Monk, photographed by Robert Bolton at the Atlanta Jazz Festival, May 1966. From the Robert Bolton Collection.

New images of Edgar Allan Poe have surfaced, the Associated Press reports in a rather excitable article that calls the writer “vigorous” and “dashing.”

The more robust Poe is captured in a small watercolor by A.C. Smith, one of just three surviving portraits of the author, which will be shown publicly for the first time Saturday and is expected to fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction.

Poe sits at a desk with pen and paper in hand, seemingly at the height of his creative powers. His upper lip is clean-shaven, though he sports long, bushy sideburns. And there’s the slightest hint of a smile on his face.

“It actually represents Poe as he appeared to his contemporaries — a handsome, sophisticated young man on the rise,” said Cliff Krainik, the owner of the portrait and a Poe scholar. “The daguerreotypes show him in his rather dissipated state, where he has gone through the difficulties of his life.”

Today, by the way, is Poe’s birthday. He was born in 1809, two years to the day after some other Virginian you might have heard of: Robert E. Lee.

PREVIOUSLY: The man in this picture is not Edgar Allan Poe.

IMAGE: A portrait of Edgar Allan Poe released Monday, Jan. 18, 2010, by via Cliff Krainik is seen. The small watercolor by A.C. Smith shows Poe sitting at desk with pen and paper in hand. His famous mustache is missing, and there’s the slightest hint of a smile on his face. The portrait will be unveiled Saturday, Jan. 23, 2010, to the public in Baltimore as part of Poe’s birthday celebration. Krainik, plans to sell the portrait at auction later this year. Auctioneer Wes Cowan expects it to sell for $30,000 to $50,000—and he says that’s a conservative estimate.

Here’s a story of an encyclopedia editor (that’s me) who tries his hand at editing Wikipedia, with mixed results (see Bix Beiderbecke), only to find five dollars at the end! In fact, it’s such an awesome story, it’s picked up by the Los Angeles Times.

Except for the part about five dollars. They left that out.

UPDATE: A response from Wiki.

James Branch Cabell’s novel Jurgen (1919) is reviewed at my new favorite blog-slash-literary website, The Second Pass. The review begins with this evocative epigraph . . .

“I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don’t know why, exactly. The book hurts me—tears me to small pieces—but somehow it sets me free. It says the word that I’ve been trying to pronounce for so long. It tells me everything I am, and have been, and may be, unsparingly. . . . I don’t know why I cry over it so much. It’s too—something-or-other—to stand. I’ve been sitting here tonight, reading it aloud, with the tears streaming down my face . . .”
—Deems Taylor, in a letter to Mary Kennedy, December 12, 1920

. . . before going on to compare Cabell’s characters to “those of Quentin Tarantino, [which] tend to riff most elegantly at the moments of their greatest depravity.” As our entry suggests, Cabell himself could have been a Tarantino character. That is not really captured by the picture above; instead, check out Carl Van Vechten’s creepier portrait.

In a Washington Post article from November, Rob Pegoraro investigates the burgeoning world of “augmented reality”–a concept that makes your mobile phone (as of right now it has to be phone working on the Android or iPhone platforms) into a tool that uncovers layers of information in the world around you.

Let’s take this faux scenario: say you want to see how much the houses in your neighborhood sold or are selling for. You pick up your phone, open up a mobile app like Layar or Wikitude, pull up the local real estate dataset in that application, point the phone’s camera at the buildings around you and the screen is populated with hyperlinked dots you might click on for further information (e.g. price, amenities, etc.).

Well, if you can do this for real estate, why not for the historical events that have occurred and are occurring around us? What if you had historical events pinpointed to specific enough locations to deploy to these applications? Well, we’ve been playing with this idea at Encyclopedia Virginia. We already have a large dataset of geolocated event points that is tied to entries that add to one’s understanding of the events that occurred at those points. Check out these two proofs of concept:

and this one:

Someone asked me recently if I thought this endeavor and use of EV content was a bit overwrought and a waste of time. If you consider the rapid increase in market share that devices like the iPhone, Droid, and the new Nexus One are grabbing, and the potential uses in education and tourism that apps like Layar open up, then I’d have to say this is time well wasted.

EV programmer Peter Hedlund recently visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and saw the above murals—of Washington’s Mount Vernon and Jefferson’ Monticello—by artist Kerry James Marshall.

Although he holds both George Washington … and Thomas Jefferson in high regard, he challenges their legacy by toying with optical illusions within both landscapes. Figures of slaves are hidden within the murals  because Marshall  believes they have been concealed in popular accounts of these forefathers of American history.

The paintings are on display until May.

Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic writes about a trip to Virginia this past summer to visit Civil War battlefields:

I pulled our rental car to the side of the road, and treated my son and nephew to an awkward impromptu lecture on the bravery of Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood and Private Charles Veale. It was only mildly successful–I had to talk over SUVs loudly whizzing past, and there really wasn’t much to see. Parts of the battlefield had been destroyed by housing developments. Other portions, owned by the county, are closed to the public. I ordered the kids out of the car and had them read the marker aloud, in unison. They squirmed around and gave mediocre waves as I snapped pictures.

In my lifetime, I have floated through all manner of geekdom–comic books, sci-fi, sports, medieval history, video games. The Civil War, with its swashbuckling heroes, its staggering toll, and its consequence of emancipation, is the culmination of an unorthodox intellectual journey. Galactus and Charlemagne are charming, but if not for Fleetwood and Veale, I might not exist. By the time I stumbled upon New Market Heights, I’d read about the battle in at least three books.

But I had come to Virginia to move beyond books and render my journey through the “late unpleasantness” in 3-D. Books about everything from the caliber of every cannon fired to post-traumatic stress disorder to Civil War cuisine can’t adequately capture the actual conditions under which the soldiers lived and died; they can’t convey, say, the spatial reality of being caught between gunfire from two sides. Any lesson on the Battle of the Crater isn’t complete until you’ve been to Petersburg and seen the crater for yourself. Civil War sites are the classrooms of history.

Coates is a lovely writer and a curious, sometimes unorthodox thinker, as his blog will attest. I just wish that he had linked to our Battle of the Crater entry!