Our Kepone entry details one of the first national environmental scandals that played out here in Virginia during the mid-1970s. The toxic chemical was produced in Hopewell and for nine years dumped in the James River. The citizens of Hopewell discovered the effects of this dumping in 1975, when an employee of Life Sciences, who [...]

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From Ta-Nehisi Coates: We have too much faith in talk,—or rather we have too much faith in big men to control events through talk. The obsession with a “dialouge around race” is nauseating. I can’t tell if it’s real, or just a notion that (much like “postracial”) that cable news hosts put to their guests. [...]

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Encyclopedia Virginia was on TV last night. NBC29 in Charlottesville gave the project a thumbs up on the news last night. You can watch the video here.

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Today is the 145th anniversary of the Battle of the Crater, which was fought near Petersburg, Virginia, on July 30, 1864. Kevin Levin marks the occasion by responding to our post from earlier this week, “Explaining a Massacre.” He has some words of praise and a response to Peter Luebke’s suggestion that certain claims about [...]

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The University of Virginia takes notice of Encyclopedia Virginia today: EV also embraces the interdisciplinary nature of its entries. For instance, the entry for the “Wreck of the Old 97″ – which relates the story of the 1903 crash of a Southern Railways freight train in Danville – connects topics under transportation with music, folk [...]

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In a couple of provocative posts at his blog Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin writes about the infamous Battle of the Crater, fought on July 30, 1864, and the massacre of black troops that immediately followed it. He’s interested in the context of the moment: what did it mean for Virginia soldiers—some of them slave [...]

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The National D-Day Memorial in Bedford is in danger of closing due to financial problems. A bill designed to help is wending its way through Congress: An effort to save the National D-Day Memorial has made some progress, as the U.S. Senate passed a defense-spending bill that instructs officials to consider making the monument a [...]

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This e-mail made the rounds here at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities yesterday: Dear Board Members and Staff, I am delighted to report that “With Good Reason” has just been named to receive a 2009 Gabriel Award in the category of “Best News/Informational Radio Programming.”  Presented by the Catholic Academy for Communication Arts Professionals, [...]

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The Richmond Times-Dispatch published an editorial on July 16 headlined “Our Past,” in which it apologized for its support of Massive Resistance during the 1950s and beyond. (Our entry on Massive Resistance provides the requisite background.) The newspaper admitted its complicity in championing segregationist policies, writing that “the record fills us with regret.” Massive Resistance [...]

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The thing I love about BackStory is that they’re great at stirring the pot. Take their recent show on Independence Day. It prompted this comment on the website: I found several aspects of the piece on the Declaration rather sensational and disingenuous—a rather second year way of making things look important. It goes on, but [...]

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Part of the whole point of putting Encyclopedia Virginia on the web is so that we can update our history as it changes and so that we can fix mistakes when they are pointed out to us. We were alerted to one possible mistake by a reader of our entry on the Jamestown property owner [...]

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At the Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864, approximately 3,800 Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured, 1,327 of whom were members of the United States Colored Troops. One of those wounded was the man pictured above, Private Louis Martin of Company E, 29th U.S. Colored Infantry. He lost his right arm and [...]

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Well, almost. Yesterday we called attention to our Anne Spencer entry. Back in March, the Legacy Museum in Lynchburg screened a film by Keith Lee about the poet called Anne Spencer Revisited. Turns out Lee had originally wanted to do a dance, an idea that came to him after visiting Spencer’s Lynchburg home. Keith Lee [...]

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Encyclopedia entries are deceptively hard to write, and our entries on writers are perhaps the most challenging. You want to get all the interesting biographical stuff in there while also doing justice to the art. Who is this poet as a person, but also who is this poet as a poet? On a good day, [...]

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The Washington Post reports this morning that John Grisham is writing a screenplay about the so-called Norfolk Four, four sailors who claim to have been wrongly convicted in the rape and murder of a Norfolk woman in 1997. The men confessed to the crime, but following their guilty verdicts, recanted, claiming they had been coerced. [...]

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This familiar bit of grammar history came from Shelby Foote during Ken Burns’s PBS documentary The Civil War (1990): Before the war, it was said “the United States are.” Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. And after the war, it was always “the United States is,” [...]

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In time for the Fourth of July, a new poll asks Americans whether they still agree with the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Turns out . . . that 89% of American adults agree that “we are all endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights among them life, liberty, and the [...]

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It’s July 1, 2009, which means that 146 years ago today the Army of Northern Virginia tripped over some Union cavalry stationed at a small, college-friendly crossroads called Gettysburg. The Confederate troops were from A. P. Hill‘s corps and included men in Henry Heth‘s division. Yes, they had been looking for shoes, but they found [...]

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