The exhibit Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty opens today at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. This has been a huge undertaking by the historians at Monticello, and the New York Times has pronounced their efforts to be good: The contradictions in notions of liberty could not be more [...]

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Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! The University of Virginia—and Encyclopedia Virginia, too—is observing the federal holiday, while the administration of Washington and Lee University has decided to take a pass. This has caused some consternation, as the Washington Post reports. While the university has scheduled programming to honor King, some students are concerned that [...]

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Last year, upon the release of Five Ponds Press’s fourth-grade textbook, Our Virginia, and its unfavorable write-up in the Washington Post, the history nerds of Virginia—which is to say, pretty much everybody—mobilized into a mass orgy of righteous fact-checking. I was right there with them, of course, shocked to learn that Sir Walter Raleigh had [...]

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It’s a tough time for Civil War monuments, apparently. On December 11, NBC29 in Charlottesville reported that the city’s equestrian Robert E. Lee monument had been vandalized, possibly by the Occupy protestors who had been living in the surrounding park. One historian declared this to be “a stupid and disturbing act.” It certainly was witless, [...]

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A news report over the holiday tells us that William Kelso, the archaeologist who discovered the fort at Jamestown and wrote about it in Jamestown: The Buried Truth (2008), is now “certain” he has discovered the site of the church where the minister Richard Bucke married Pocahontas and John Rolfe. She was “married right here, [...]

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The Battle of the Crater will be examined on a PBS series: The tunnel that Union soldiers dug to blow a crater under Confederate defenses at Petersburg, Va., is not usually juxtaposed with, say, the Great Wall of China. But the Battle of the Crater makes the cut in the new PBS series “Ground War,” [...]

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In the wake of Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s declaration of Confederate History Month and all the resulting hoopla, Ta-Nehisi Coates considers the memory of Robert E. Lee. In so doing, he quotes a lecture by Elizabeth Brown Pryor that aired on C-SPAN: It’s wrong to turn [Lee] into this unreal person. And I’ll tell you [...]

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Willa Cather‘s birthplace, a tw0-story log house on Back Creek near Winchester, is for sale. In 1950, Charles Brill’s parents bought the house, and he spent most of his life on the property. Now Brill is looking for a buyer who can maintain the house—perhaps even a member of Cather’s family. Brill is committed to selling [...]

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Now showing at the Virginia Historical Society: Cold War Crisis: The U-2 Incident / January 16–May 30, 2010 On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over the Soviet Union by a surface-to-air missile. Francis Gary Powers—a civilian pilot flying for the Central Intelligence Agency—was unable to activate the self-destruct mechanism [...]

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Mark Linkous, whose nom de music, as it were, was Sparklehorse, died over the weekend. The Arlington native is remembered in the New York Times: But disillusioned with the music business, Mr. Linkous returned to Virginia and reinvented his sound as Sparklehorse, a name that he applied to himself as well as his band. “We [...]

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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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The wonderful, statewide, VFH-sponsored radio program With Good Reason featured Encyclopedia Virginia‘s managing editor Matthew Gibson and one of our section editors, Dr. John Kneebone, on a recent broadcast. Listen here, where you’ll also find a discussion of the “discovery” of America. IMAGE: I took the image above from the With Good Reason site as [...]

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Tony Field, producer of the VFH radio program BackStory, reminds us that the show’s new episode on health care will air tonight: BackStory‘s latest episode, “Body Politics: A History of Health Care,” will be airing this evening in Central Virginia. It’s a strong show, with obvious relevance to the current debate in Washington. Features include [...]

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Mike Seeger, the folk singer, instrumentalist, and folklorist, died in Lexington on Friday. He was 75. The New York Times has an excellent obituary, which includes this, from Bob Dylan: “Mike was unprecedented,” Mr. Dylan wrote, adding: “As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s [...]

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Last month, we had occasion to mention the fact 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 [...]

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The Washington Post weighs in on Wal-Mart and the Wilderness this morning. It’s one of those staff editorials obsessed with balance and being fair—not that there’s anything wrong with that!—but not particularly interested in actually making an argument or having an opinion. Preservationists are right to want to protect some of the battlefield. However, if [...]

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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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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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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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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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