Today I’ve been working on captions for images we will upload with an already published entry about the Chancellorsville Campaign. In this particular photograph, Union infantrymen in John Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps huddle together on the west bank of the Rappahannock River on April 29 or 30, 1863. Until the 1980s, the image was mis-credited to [...]

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Herbert Barger’s often ALL-CAPPED protestations notwithstanding, the critical consensus seems to have swung decisively in the direction of Annette Gordon-Reed and her interpretation of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. For her history The Hemingses of Monticello, Gordon-Reed has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and now the George Washington Book Prize, given annually [...]

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In a post yesterday, I referenced Garry Wills’s recent article on Lincoln’s racism. Most of the article is concerned with describing and contextualizing (as opposed to justifying and excusing) that racism, but near the end, Wills asks an important question: What is the final judgment to be on the great emancipator? That’s the sort of [...]

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“Down in the Vale of Shenandoah” was a popular song from 1904. Its composer was Charles K. Harris, King of the Tear-Jerkers, who despite being a native of Poughkeepsie, New York, seemed to like writing about Virginia. His song “Mid the Green Fields of Virginia” reached No. 2 on the Billboard charts—in 1899. (I’m assuming [...]

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Against the advice of a handful of scholars, President Obama contributed a wreath this week to a memorial to Confederate dead. (He compromised by also sending a wreath to a memorial honoring black soldiers.) The scholars—including James W. Loewen, who has been mentioned on these pages here—attacked neo-Confederates. This prompted an equally furious counterattack on [...]

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This morning, the Washington Post has a story that wonders where all of Virginia’s great race horses have gone. In 1973, when Secretariat, a stallion born and raised in Caroline County, Va., won the Triple Crown, the state was a regular contender in the nation’s highest-profile races. Virginia has been famous as a producer of [...]

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An advertisement in the Norfolk Herald on October 2, 1800, calling attention to two runaway slaves—a father and daughter: Twenty Dollars Reward. Ran away, about the 20th instant, a Negro Man called BRISTOL, and his daughter SALLY. Bristol is a short, thick, very black fellow, with very short curled hair; his clothes are sailor’s, being [...]

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The Virginia Folklife Program—which, like Encyclopedia Virginia, is sponsored by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities—held its annual Apprentice Showcase this month. It was an amazing show, with gunsmiths and Ethiopian drummers; old-time fiddlers and Brunswick stew makers; a storyteller and a world-champion oyster shucker; and, to finish off the afternoon, Maggie Ingram & The [...]

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I enjoyed the following bit of snark from the historian Gary W. Gallagher. He’s referring to the 1907 print Lee and His Generals by George Bagby Matthews (above). In suggesting that Matthews’s artistic skill was perhaps lacking and his choices sometimes odd (“Lee stands just a bit taller than twenty-five fellow generals, all of whom, [...]

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The man pictured above is James Branch Cabell, the Richmond-born author of fifty-two books, one of which, Jurgen (1919), was the subject of an obscenity suit in New York and briefly banned. And let’s face it, he looks like the sort of dude whose book might be banned for obscenity. The portrait is by Carl [...]

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After a few posts about John Brown, it seems only right to post this gorgeous photo of Harpers Ferry from 1865. The print is in the Library of Congress, but we’ve taken this digital version from the excellent historical photo blog Shorpy, where you might enjoy readers’ observations on the bridge as well as modern [...]

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Regarding “The Spock,” an alleged church just south of Lynchburg whose religion is based on the Star Trek television series and, in particular, the fictional character Mr. Spock and his fellow Vulcans: The ideology of the church is centered on so-called Vulcan philosophy which includes the belief in pure “logic” and which emphasizes a lifestyle [...]

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Massive Resistance represented something like Virginia’s last stand against desegregation. State leaders actually closed public schools rather than desegregate them as the U.S. Supreme Court, beginning with its Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, had required. How to justify such a move? By the time the General Assembly met in January 1956, key [...]

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As noted previously, Alfred Appel Jr. has died, and Appel wrote a book about jazz in which he mentioned the baseball player Van Lingo Mungo, whose name was so cool that the jazz musician Dave Frishberg wrote a song about it—a song whose lyrics consisted of only the names of baseball players. Frishberg also wrote [...]

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Look, I know this has no connection to Virginia—although, for the record, I used the full power of Google to try create one. But we’re going to go ahead and mourn the loss of Alfred Appel Jr. anyway. After all, we are not only about the Civil War here, or history; we are about Nabokov [...]

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In a previous post, I mentioned John Brown. The “Old Puritan,” as he was sometimes called, was the subject of an hour-long discussion at the Virginia Civil War Sesquicentennial Signature Conference in Richmond last week. Four scholars gathered together to present an understanding, fit for 2009, of the infamous liberator-or-terrorist (depending, perhaps, on your section) [...]

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I have no interest in making any partisan avowals here, only to note (as I did earlier) the interesting re-emergence of secession and nullification in the political lexicon. Our entry on states’ rights should be up soon. Meanwhile, our entry on Gettysburg is up, and it includes the above photo of three Confederate prisoners. The [...]

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The opening of Virginia’s Civil War Sesquicentennial was held a week ago today at the University of Richmond. It featured a daylong conference on life in 1859—that year being deemed, for the purposes of commemoration, the beginning of the Civil War. After all, it was John Brown—hanged in Charles Town, Virginia, on December 2, 1859—who [...]

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Courtesy of the Civil War Preservation Trust, here is video of Robert Duvall speaking at the Wilderness yesterday on the subject of a proposed Wal-Mart there. Short version: He’s against it. Also, he’s related to Robert E. Lee. The Associated Press picked up on the story, telling its readers that Duvall “believes in capitalism coupled [...]

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