We defer to The Chicago Manual of Style on most issues involving grammar and punctuation—in other words, stuff we would prefer to spend as little time as possible thinking about. And it’s clear that Chicago has spent whole lifetimes worrying over the existential consequences of, say, a misplaced comma. To paraphrase one of our editors, [...]

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This image of High Bridge showed up recently on Shorpy, a blog dedicated to historical photos. (Click on the photograph for a larger view.) Located a few miles east of Farmville in Prince Edward County, the bridge crosses the Appomattox River (and valley) and was built in 1852 for the Southside Railroad run from Petersburg [...]

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You might recall from an earlier post a kind of epistemological angst where the great newspaperman Louis Isaac Jaffé was concerned. For instance, according to Encyclopedia Virginia‘s biography, the Pulitzer Prize-winner was only “apparently” born in Detroit. And unlike his parents he crowned his final e with an accent, leaving the curious among us to [...]

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Fact beats fiction. This is as much an article of faith for historians as rock beats scissors is for second-graders. Ah, but ’twas not always thus. (Re facts, not rocks.) According to a recent New Yorker piece, the empirical, scientific approach to history only began a few hundred years ago and only became fully accepted [...]

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You have to pay attention to the details. Case in point: a note from contributor Alexander Leidholdt came attached to his entry on Louis Isaac Jaffé. You’ll recall that in 1929 Jaffé became the first Virginian to win the Pulitzer Prize for his series of anti-lynching editorials in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. According to our entry, [...]

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Welcome to the Encyclopedia Virginia blog. An online compendium of Virginia history written by scholars from across the country (even across the world), the encyclopedia is currently being compiled here at EV headquarters in Charlottesville. We plan to use these pages to explain what we’re doing and what it’s good for; to illuminate some of [...]

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