Encyclopedia Virginia (Beta) is now officially live. We’re adding content every week, and we’ll use this space in part to highlight newly posted entries. You can also check the blog’s sidebar for updated content, or subscribe to the encyclopedia’s RSS feed, which can be particularized to the kind of content you prefer to read. In [...]

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Yes, the new, seventh season of the FOX drama 24 is terrible. (They’ve all been terrible since Season 3; to quote Jack Twist, “I wish I knew how to quit you!”) Still, there’s a character named Ethan Kanin, which is interesting because his name looks an awful lot like Ethan Canin, the novelist and short [...]

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Allen Tate on Edgar Allan Poe: He is like a child—all appetite without sensibility; but to be in manhood all appetite, all will, without sensibility is to be a monster; to feed spiritually upon men without sharing with them a real world is spiritual vampirism. Ouch.

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When I sat down to write this post on Allen Tate’s novel The Fathers (1938), I didn’t intend to write about the book and what it means. (I don’t know what it means.) I only intended to reproduce one of my favorite passages. So I’ll do that here, instead. It’s a footnote, the book’s only [...]

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A remarkable fact from this morning’s Washington Post: Tobacco crops in Southside and southwest Virginia once fueled the state’s economy. But in recent years, some farmers have turned to soybeans, hay and cattle. Others folded. The number of tobacco farms in Virginia has been cut by half. In 1997, Virginia tobacco farms produced 118,000 pounds [...]

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I am reading The Fathers (1938), the only novel by Allen Tate, a poet best known for his “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (1928). Tate was born in Kentucky, but his mother, Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell, was Fairfax County-bred, and The Fathers is set at Pleasant Hill, the plantation of her youth. Tate was a [...]

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An obituary in the Metro section of the Washington Post caught my eye this morning. Flora M. Crater was 94 and a woman’s rights activist in Virginia. Ms. Crater, founder and editor of the Woman Activist newsletter and the Almanac of Virginia Politics, led a group of women known as Crater’s Raiders to lobby for [...]

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The New Yorker‘s David Remnick writes about the Georgia congressman and Civil Rights Movement veteran John Lewis. Before the Inauguration, Remnick says, Lewis had told parishioners that he would have thought that only a ‘crazy’ person would predict the election of an African-American President in his lifetime, but now he was sure that the masses [...]

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