Yesterday, hundreds of people clicked on our post about black Confederates. One of those people, a friend of mine recently of Charlottesville, even watched the segment from History Detectives we linked to and, whaddya know, she recognized a photograph of her own relative! That’s him seated there with his giant sword, his hat at a [...]

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A reader named John Stones has replied to our entry on black Confederates: I am sure that many US service members that were drafted down through the years would not have done so voluntarily, either. Their service was just as “coerced” but I’m sure they were/are all seen as soldiers! Get a life and stop [...]

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The other day, alert reader Marc Anderson noticed the phrase “Petty Auger” in one of Landon Carter’s diary entries. “I’m assuming the transcriber was not familiar with near the same name ‘periauger’? … the boat,” Anderson wrote, referring to the fact that the word means dugout canoe, such as what is being constructed by the [...]

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I received an anonymous comment last night related to our Henry “Box” Brown entry: The date Henry Brown entered his box was March 29th, not March 23rd as written on this web page. While one might believe with all credibility that the 29th is the correct date (after all Brown writes in his own narrative [...]

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A reader objects to our image caption describing Northern depictions of the capture of Confederate president Jefferson Davis at the end of the Civil War. After Davis was finally tracked down by Union cavalry in Georgia and hauled back to Fort Monroe in Virginia, many Northern newspapers reported that he had been disguised in women’s [...]

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Feedback from a reader of our Buck v. Bell entry whose aunt, like Carrie Buck, was institutionalized at the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded in Lynchburg: I have an Aunt that was placed at this same place for the same reason,she will be 87 next month, she is the only one left from [...]

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For the last several weeks, we have excerpted our Robert E. Lee entry into separate Virginia Vignettes: Was Lee Called Robert, Bob, or R. E.? What Did Robert E. Lee Think About Slavery? Was There a Downside to Robert E. Lee’s Bold Generalship? What Was Robert E. Lee Like After the Civil War? The Vignettes [...]

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The following objection was recently submitted by a reader in response to our entry on the Virginia Convention of 1861. In writing about the machinations of the secession convention in Richmond, we write: “Ominously for the Unionists, the vote came a week after Lincoln ended his vacillation over what to do and resolved to send [...]

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