Yesterday’s blog post included the remarkable fact that, after the Civil War, Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph sold their Mississippi plantation to one of their former slaves, Benjamin Montgomery. The transaction was illegal and therefore secret, and the price was a whopping $300,000. According to this inflation calculator, that’s about $4 million in today’s [...]

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I came across two unexpected Virginia connections in our entry on Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president. Oh, by the way, Davis’s two hundredth birthday, as a few bloggers have pointed out, came on June 3 of this year, the same day that Barack Obama won the Democratic presidential nomination. Anyway, Virginia connections. I’ll just give [...]

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Miscegenation is all the rage! It’s been the focus of a couple of entries on this blog and will, in the coming week, be a concern of the weekly history radio show BackStory. (If you’re interested in the topic, be sure to check out the episode description and then email the show at backstory[at]virginia[dot]edu. They’ll [...]

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In Pt. 1, we moaned about the difficulty of making fine historical distinctions in the space of a mere 200 words and then used, as an example, a distinction that—let’s face it—wasn’t particularly fine at all. The “multitudinous” Moncure Conway did not, in fact, storm a Boston jail in 1854 or otherwise “participate” in activities [...]

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Each week, Encyclopedia Virginia publishes a feature called Virginia Vignettes. These are short paragraphs highlighting some bit of Virginia history and are often, though not always, culled from entries we are working on for the encyclopedia. You can keep up with the Vignettes by regularly visiting the website, by submitting your name to our mailing [...]

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I was in Richmond recently and I wondered aloud whether the city had been burned during the Civil War. This was, perhaps, a stupid question, but I’m from Iowa. So there you go. “Yes,” my companions patiently informed me, “Richmond had been burned to the ground”—but the passive voice, as they say, was used. And [...]

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Today is the forty-first anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that in 1967 legalized mixed-race marriages. In this morning’s Washington Post, African American novelist Karyn Langhorne Folan writes of her own mixed-race marriage, explaining how the stigmatization of her relationship dates back to the Jim Crow South. Back then, hatred was [...]

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Rachel Quimby, Associate Producer of the new history-focused radio show BackStory, has submitted this description of the program. Readers of the Encyclopedia Virginia blog should check it out . . . VFH radio is proud to announce the launch of BackStory with the American History Guys—the nation’s ONLY call-in history show! Each week, renowned (but [...]

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