The name of the publication is Encyclopedia Virginia, which assumes that the subjects of our articles are connected to the state in some way. Which is a safe assumption, of course, but those connections are more tenuous for some than for others. Take Martin R. Delany. Here’s an early draft of the introduction to our [...]

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One of the more remarkable figures in Virginia history made a surprise appearance this weekend in the letters section of the New York Times Book Review. Writing about the legacy of Reconstruction (in response to an earlier review about the Colfax massacre), Stanford professor Carl Degler cites William Mahone and the case of Virginia. In [...]

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Belle Boyd was one of the Confederacy’s most notorious spies. And her 1865 memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, is full of so many outrageous stories that historians have long had difficulty knowing what to believe. Still, I find this paragraph from our entry to be extraordinary: “Boyd was released [from prison] in December [...]

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In light of that gruesome photograph of a dead Confederate at Petersburg, here is something I wrote for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire at the very beginning of the Iraq War, when newspaper editors were furiously debating how graphic their coverage of the war could be . . . The Associated Press recently moved [...]

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A few weeks ago, in a blog post about race, the issue of eugenics came up. I promised some more on that and, well, here it is. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, affirmed the constitutionality of a 1924 law empowering Virginia to sterilize individuals it deemed genetically “unfit.” By itself, [...]

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The novelist Marilynne Robinson, in Amherst Magazine, refers to a different place but speaks, I think, to the spirit behind Encyclopedia Virginia: I’ve always felt that people somehow immortalize themselves in a landscape, that the mere fact of a specific human presence in a place leaves it changed. The earliest American poetry is haunted by [...]

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I’m still stuck on that sentence from Mary Tucker Magill’s Virginia history textbook: “Generally speaking, the negroes proved a harmless and affectionate race, easily governed, and happy in their condition.” It reminded me of a passage from William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a long, lyrical, devastating paragraph that comes near the end of [...]

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This morning’s Washington Post reports that archaeologists have found the likely site of George Washington’s childhood home near Fredericksburg. They’ve also uncovered marbles, wig curlers, utensils, dinnerware, and a pipe with a Masonic crest on it. “What’s so great about this dig is that when people talk about Washington, they always talk about his adult [...]

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Kevin Levin, at his blog Civil War Memory, recently posted an image and an excerpt from an old Virginia history textbook. He was disgusted (and rightly so) by the book’s outlandish description of slavery, which emphasized feelings of “strong affection” between masters and their “cheerful” slaves. I was thinking of this while proofreading our entry [...]

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Last week, the blog Shorpy posted a series of photographs of the dead from the Civil War battlefield of Petersburg. Like the one above, they’re tough to look at and even tougher to consider fully for all their moral, political, social, military, and even aesthetic ramifications. There’s a lot going on, in other words. The [...]

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