Just for fun: Go to the New York Times online and punch “George Pickett” into the search engine there. What you’ll find is Encyclopedia Virginia‘s entry on the famous Confederate general. The Times has begun to syndicate our content, beginning with Pickett, in their Times Topic series. The goal for the Timesis to have such articles provide background knowledge and context [...]

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, after watching one of David Blight’s free online seminars on slavery and the Civil War, wonders about the economics of bondage. In particular, he asks his readers to explain why Southerners believed, before the war, that slavery would die if it weren’t allowed to expand into new U.S. territories. My basic read is [...]

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Eleanor Ross Taylor is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for her collection Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008. From our entry: Taylor’s poetry is most often compared to that of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. “[O]f course I loved Emily Dickinson and read a lot of [...]

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I love it when the New York Times uses big words like crepuscular, as in the “strange crepuscular tradition” of some black-clad dude visiting Edgar Allan Poe‘s graveside every year on his birthday—which was yesterday—bearing three red roses and a bottle of Cognac. The tradition goes back to 1949, apparently. But the visitor—whose identity, or [...]

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New images of Edgar Allan Poe have surfaced, the Associated Press reports in a rather excitable article that calls the writer “vigorous” and “dashing.” The more robust Poe is captured in a small watercolor by A.C. Smith, one of just three surviving portraits of the author, which will be shown publicly for the first time [...]

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Here’s a story of an encyclopedia editor (that’s me) who tries his hand at editing Wikipedia, with mixed results (see Bix Beiderbecke), only to find five dollars at the end! In fact, it’s such an awesome story, it’s picked up by the Los Angeles Times. Except for the part about five dollars. They left that [...]

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James Branch Cabell‘s novel Jurgen (1919) is reviewed at my new favorite blog-slash-literary website, The Second Pass. The review begins with this evocative epigraph . . . “I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don’t know why, exactly. The book hurts me—tears me to small [...]

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In a Washington Post article from November, Rob Pegoraro investigates the burgeoning world of “augmented reality”–a concept that makes your mobile phone (as of right now it has to be phone working on the Android or iPhone platforms) into a tool that uncovers layers of information in the world around you. Let’s take this faux [...]

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EV programmer Peter Hedlund recently visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and saw the above murals—of Washington’s Mount Vernon and Jefferson’ Monticello—by artist Kerry James Marshall. Although he holds both George Washington … and Thomas Jefferson in high regard, he challenges their legacy by toying with optical illusions within both landscapes. Figures of [...]

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Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic writes about a trip to Virginia this past summer to visit Civil War battlefields: I pulled our rental car to the side of the road, and treated my son and nephew to an awkward impromptu lecture on the bravery of Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood and Private Charles Veale. It was [...]

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