This week’s Virginia Vignette is about an escape from Libby Prison in Richmond during the Civil War. Around 109 Union officers tunneled out, with fifty-nine of them eventually reaching the safety of their own lines. The last two sentences of the Vignette prompted skepticism from some readers, however. Here’s what we wrote: A prison employee, [...]

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In this morning’s Washington Post, film reviewer Anne Hornaday writes about her own family’s connection to a name that recently has “bubble(d) up into the zeitgeist”: Ota Benga. Benga was an African pygmy who, in 1904, was brought to the United States from the Congo, where his family had been massacred and he had been [...]

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