A remarkable fact from this morning’s Washington Post: Tobacco crops in Southside and southwest Virginia once fueled the state’s economy. But in recent years, some farmers have turned to soybeans, hay and cattle. Others folded. The number of tobacco farms in Virginia has been cut by half. In 1997, Virginia tobacco farms produced 118,000 pounds [...]

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An obituary in the Metro section of the Washington Post caught my eye this morning. Flora M. Crater was 94 and a woman’s rights activist in Virginia. Ms. Crater, founder and editor of the Woman Activist newsletter and the Almanac of Virginia Politics, led a group of women known as Crater’s Raiders to lobby for [...]

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The New Yorker‘s David Remnick writes about the Georgia congressman and Civil Rights Movement veteran John Lewis. Before the Inauguration, Remnick says, Lewis had told parishioners that he would have thought that only a ‘crazy’ person would predict the election of an African-American President in his lifetime, but now he was sure that the masses [...]

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When one considers the term massive–or “collective”–resistance, we might try and channel Thoreauian idealism and think of a movement by a downtrodden people to subvert or protest a tyrannical status quo. In the case of Virginia history, however,  “Massive Resistance” was anything but a subversive movement for high moral principles. Massive Resistance was the political–and [...]

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of Encyclopedia Virginia there was Andrew Chancey [pronounced 'An-drëw Chän-see'; aka VFH Director of Planning and Management and Executive Editor of Encyclopedia Virginia]. Andrew–known as “Andy” to his friends outside the office–came to the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities over eight years ago. He rose in the VFH ranks quickly, going from a half-time employee [...]

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This morning’s Washington Post reports that archaeologists have found the likely site of George Washington’s childhood home near Fredericksburg. They’ve also uncovered marbles, wig curlers, utensils, dinnerware, and a pipe with a Masonic crest on it. “What’s so great about this dig is that when people talk about Washington, they always talk about his adult [...]

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Last week, the blog Shorpy posted a series of photographs of the dead from the Civil War battlefield of Petersburg. Like the one above, they’re tough to look at and even tougher to consider fully for all their moral, political, social, military, and even aesthetic ramifications. There’s a lot going on, in other words. The [...]

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Rachel Quimby, Associate Producer of the new history-focused radio show BackStory, has submitted this description of the program. Readers of the Encyclopedia Virginia blog should check it out . . . VFH radio is proud to announce the launch of BackStory with the American History Guys—the nation’s ONLY call-in history show! Each week, renowned (but [...]

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George Garrett died on Sunday at the age of 78. He was, in the words of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s blog, a “prolific author, screenwriter, professor, and beloved Charlottesville figure.” He was cofounder of the AWP, a national association of writers and writing programs. Perhaps most of all, he was a mentor to many, many [...]

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First it was Ed Ayers. Soon after he joined Encyclopedia Virginia‘s Editorial Advisory Board he was named the ninth president of the University of Richmond. Then it was Sandy Treadway. On July 1, 2007 she became the Librarian of Virginia after unanimous appointment. And we recently received more good news: yesterday Paul Levengood, another stalwart [...]

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Last Saturday, I sat through a two-hour discussion on slave housing. I’ll admit that it was a tiny bit tedious, eighteenth-century building techniques not being my primary interest, but I was taping it as a favor for my absent friend, the historian Henry Wiencek. Anyway, a scholar from Mount Vernon was explaining how he had [...]

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This morning’s Washington Post tells of the Library of Congress’s effort to reproduce Thomas Jefferson’s famous library. The first third of his 6,000-plus volumes were, unsurprisingly, in the LOC’s own collection. After all, that’s where the collection came from in the first place (in 1815, an always debt-ridden Jefferson donated his library to the fledgling [...]

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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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Kevin Levin’s Charlottesville-based blog Civil War Memory points to the above World War II poster, which is a part of the current Lee & Grant exhibit sponsored by the Virginia Historical Society. It seems a perfect example of how the “Lost Cause” mythology can be used, ironically, to unite the country (an idea suggested by [...]

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