Beware captions.
I came across this portrait in some research on Poe, and was excited: there aren’t a wide variety of images of Poe available, and none from this early on in his life, which, given his time at the University of Virginia, was of particular interest for EV. The caption pleasantly informs us that [...]

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Many of the images that we will use in Encyclopedia Virginia have been taken from large institutional archives, like those of the Library of Congress, Library of Virginia, Virginia Historical Society, etc. There is no question that the encyclopedia would not be possible without their support, and without the time and efforts of their archivists [...]

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I may be biased (I almost certainly am), but I tend to think that some of our richest and most interesting material is in our pictures and photographs. Take the above photograph, which will accompany our entry on the Great Depression, as an example. It’s one of the thousands of images commissioned by the Federal [...]

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Last week, Brendan shared a haunting photo of a bridge near Farmville, Virginia. As cataloging and sharing old photos is to some extent my chief responsibility around here, the photo—and its source, the photoblog Shorpy—immediately piqued my curiosity.
First, I wanted to know something about the provenance of the photograph. Knowing little about Shorpy, and unable [...]

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Welcome to the Encyclopedia Virginia blog. An online compendium of Virginia history written by scholars from across the country (even across the world), the encyclopedia is currently being compiled here at EV headquarters in Charlottesville. We plan to use these pages

to explain what we’re doing and what it’s good for;
to illuminate some of our editorial [...]

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