Several days ago I patched together a few thoughts on race-mixing. The writer Steven Augustine has since commented on the piece (on another blog where the essay was also posted), arguing that race is in need of a “re-think,” that the term “race” itself is racist, and, finally, that my sister considering herself to be [...]

Click to continue →

George Garrett died on Sunday at the age of 78. He was, in the words of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s blog, a “prolific author, screenwriter, professor, and beloved Charlottesville figure.” He was cofounder of the AWP, a national association of writers and writing programs. Perhaps most of all, he was a mentor to many, many [...]

Click to continue →

Meriah L. Crawford has written a great entry for us on the Virginia novelist Mary Spear Tiernan (1836–1891). Because I’ve been dwelling on Nat Turner of late, I was interested to learn that Tiernan based one of her characters on Turner. “Whoop-de-doo,” you might say, but this is a big deal because a) the character [...]

Click to continue →

First it was Ed Ayers. Soon after he joined Encyclopedia Virginia‘s Editorial Advisory Board he was named the ninth president of the University of Richmond. Then it was Sandy Treadway. On July 1, 2007 she became the Librarian of Virginia after unanimous appointment. And we recently received more good news: yesterday Paul Levengood, another stalwart [...]

Click to continue →

The other day I was editing an entry about Ambrose E. Burnside, a Union general during the Civil War.* As you can tell from the photograph, this is the same Burnside from whom we get the term “sideburns.” Here’s the thing, though. Burnside may have been cool looking, but he wasn’t from Virginia; he was [...]

Click to continue →

I was reading Henry Wiencek’s 2003 book about George Washington and slavery, An Imperfect God, and came across a provocative idea about the relationship between American democracy and slavery. We’re all quite accustomed to intellectuals going on and on about this most fundamental paradox of the early American character: the Declaration of Independence on the [...]

Click to continue →

. . . by which I mean race in America. I know, this is hardly a penetrating insight, but it’s on the mind regardless, what with Barack Obama reminding us that he has “brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents,” and some guy in Georgia [...]

Click to continue →

If my math is correct, then yesterday was the one hundred sixty-second anniversary of the start of the Mexican War. Not that this sort of anniversary requires a parade or anything, but it brought to mind a paragraph from James McPherson’s Civil War history Battle Cry of Freedom, in which he notes “the marksmanship and [...]

Click to continue →

I took Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974) off the shelf on Friday and idly opened to the foreword. I’ve always loved how it includes dramatic biographical sketches of the major players at Gettysburg (Longstreet, for instance, is “bearded, blue-eyed, ominous, slow-talking, crude,” while J.E.B. Stuart is a “laughing banjo player” and Jubal Early a [...]

Click to continue →

I was sitting on my front porch the other morning reading Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. It was a beautiful morning—clear, warm, breezy—and with my coffee and a decent view of the Blue Ridge, I was in heaven. So it seemed appropriate that I stumbled onto this passage, in which a traveling salesman visits [...]

Click to continue →

Encyclopedia Virginia is getting its Civil War list up and running and, consequently, I am trying to get started on a whole list of my own Civil War reading. At the moment, that includes James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (whew, this is going to take me all summer!) and William Styron’s The Confessions of [...]

Click to continue →

There are a couple pieces in this morning’s Washington Post on Mildred Loving, who died on Friday. Both emphasize her reticence, her refusal to place herself at the center of any cause, her desire, in the end, just to be left alone. As it turns out, it was that desire that got her mixed up [...]

Click to continue →

Mildred Loving, the Virginia woman who challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court the state’s ban on interracial marriage, died on Friday. She was sixty-eight years old. Here’s a bit of background on the case from Encyclopedia Virginia‘s entry (which was written by Phyl Newbeck, author of Virginia Hasn’t Always Been for Lovers: [...]

Click to continue →

The point of Encyclopedia Virginia is to collect what’s known. Sometimes, however, we stumble upon the heretofore unknown and that, for lack of a more sophisticated phrase, is pretty cool. Take the life of teacher, novelist, and historian Mary Tucker Magill (1830–1899). Our entry, by Dr. Mary Lynn Bayliss, asserts that Magill began her teaching [...]

Click to continue →