Beware captions. I came across this portrait in some research on Poe, and was excited: there aren’t a wide variety of images of Poe available, and none from this early on in his life, which, given his time at the University of Virginia, was of particular interest for EV. The caption pleasantly informs us that [...]

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When exactly did the Civil War start? Yes, we all learned in school that it began with the firing on Fort Sumter in April of 1861. On the other hand, Encyclopedia Virginia Managing Editor Matthew Gibson will argue that the Civil War began at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. And Media Editor Matt Gaventa recently declared [...]

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Last Saturday, I sat through a two-hour discussion on slave housing. I’ll admit that it was a tiny bit tedious, eighteenth-century building techniques not being my primary interest, but I was taping it as a favor for my absent friend, the historian Henry Wiencek. Anyway, a scholar from Mount Vernon was explaining how he had [...]

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An Encyclopedia Virginia contributor wandered into the office recently and we got to talking about Civil War reenacting. He’s been in the hobby for years and is even buddies with the fellow who so authentically scowls from the cover of Tony Horwitz’s 1999 book Confederates in the Attic. Although I was a reenactor myself—yes, there [...]

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Many of the images that we will use in Encyclopedia Virginia have been taken from large institutional archives, like those of the Library of Congress, Library of Virginia, Virginia Historical Society, etc. There is no question that the encyclopedia would not be possible without their support, and without the time and efforts of their archivists [...]

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This morning’s Washington Post tells of the Library of Congress’s effort to reproduce Thomas Jefferson’s famous library. The first third of his 6,000-plus volumes were, unsurprisingly, in the LOC’s own collection. After all, that’s where the collection came from in the first place (in 1815, an always debt-ridden Jefferson donated his library to the fledgling [...]

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I may be biased (I almost certainly am), but I tend to think that some of our richest and most interesting material is in our pictures and photographs. Take the above photograph, which will accompany our entry on the Great Depression, as an example. It’s one of the thousands of images commissioned by the Federal [...]

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The other day, on the occasion of Confederate Heritage Month, we offered the thoughts of Civil War historian Bruce Catton. The question posed: what good is the myth of the Lost Cause if it glorifies a cause in service of slavery? The answer, according to the Northerner Catton, has to do with the ability of [...]

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Kevin Levin’s Charlottesville-based blog Civil War Memory points to the above World War II poster, which is a part of the current Lee & Grant exhibit sponsored by the Virginia Historical Society. It seems a perfect example of how the “Lost Cause” mythology can be used, ironically, to unite the country (an idea suggested by [...]

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We are now smack in the middle of Confederate Heritage Month, and in honor of the occasion, the Atlantic magazine blogger Matthew Yglesias noted the following: “Why one would want to celebrate a heritage of violent rebellion against a democratically elected government in order to perpetuate a system of chattel slavery is a bit hard [...]

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Last week, Brendan shared a haunting photo of a bridge near Farmville, Virginia. As cataloging and sharing old photos is to some extent my chief responsibility around here, the photo—and its source, the photoblog Shorpy—immediately piqued my curiosity. First, I wanted to know something about the provenance of the photograph. Knowing little about Shorpy, and [...]

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Maurice Jones has been named the next publisher of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. Jones has been a Rhodes scholar, a corporate lawyer, and a senior state official, but most importantly for us, he is a member of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities board and its subcommittee on Encyclopedia Virginia. From the Virginian-Pilot‘s story today: Jones’ [...]

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This weekend I was chatting with a woman at a gathering of literary types and historians when she waved a friend over. “This young man,” she announced, “is explaining to me how Iowa is the center of the universe.” “Not at all!” I insisted far too earnestly. It’s just that here I am living in [...]

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