In his recent military history, John Keegan writes, “The American Civil War is one of the most mysterious great wars of history . . .” We’re never done exploring that mystery, especially in these sesquicentennial years, and now the Library of Virginia offers a new and useful research tool: the Civil War Research Guide. The [...]

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In 1818 Thomas Jefferson declared the “objects” of an education at the University of Virginia. To wit: To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business. To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts in writing. To improve, [...]

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Alert reader Sue Perdue, director of Documents Compass at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, saw the article we linked to yesterday on the business of encyclopedias and thought of Ball of Fire, the 1941 Howard Hawks romantic comedy starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Above is the movie’s trailer. “Educators from all over the [...]

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Apparently the Whig Party is back: The Modern Whig Party is like its namesake, only with fewer frock coats. The party was conceived in 2007 by active-duty service members in Iraq and Afghanistan, who then started recruiting nonmilitary members when they came back home. They resurrected the old Whigs’ symbol, the owl, and chiseled out [...]

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Perhaps because the good old days of “sir” and “ma’am” (and states’ rights and slavery?) are gone. The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles something called the Abbeville Institute, founded by an Emory University philosophy professor, Donald W. Livingston (pictured above), and named for the birthplace of über states’-rights and slavery advocate John C. Calhoun. The [...]

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A new article in Inside Higher Ed takes an in-depth look at the business of online encyclopedias, including Encyclopedia Virginia. Here’s a taste: Size Matters From a business standpoint, the most attractive aspect of Wikipedia might be the fact that unpaid volunteers create and edit most of the content. But to consumers, the site’s greatest [...]

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More than 150,000 books were published this year; in 1709, in the British colonies of North America, that number was just 31. Out of those, the historian Jill Lepore gives us her Top 10. Unsurprisingly, New Englanders, the likes of Increase Mather and his son Cotton, dominate the list. Virginia, after all, was “one of [...]

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A reader objects to our image caption describing Northern depictions of the capture of Confederate president Jefferson Davis at the end of the Civil War. After Davis was finally tracked down by Union cavalry in Georgia and hauled back to Fort Monroe in Virginia, many Northern newspapers reported that he had been disguised in women’s [...]

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