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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This video was embedded using the YouTuber plugin by Roy Tanck. Adobe Flash Player is required to view the video. 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 [...]

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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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