Yesterday the encyclopedia staff road-tripped it to Richmond, where we gathered with our friends at the Library of Virginia to inaugurate a new era for Encyclopedia Virginia and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. We are now officially partners with the Library in this ambitious encyclopedia project of ours and, in particular, have become the [...]

Click to continue →

The idea of this post is juxtaposition. (It’s also about burying the lede, so please read the whole thing!) First, there’s the image above, from 1863, of a former slave who enlisted in the United States Army. (No black Confederate, this guy. Go figure.) And then there’s this, from The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee: [...]

Click to continue →

You’re an encyclopedia of Virginia history, people often say to us. So where’s your entry on Thomas Jefferson? The short answer is: It’s coming! It’s coming! And maybe once it’s here, we’ll get Jack Jouett to ride around Virginia warning everybody. In the meantime, though, it’s worth explaining what takes so gosh-darn long. As I’ve [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

Frances Osborn Robb, a scholar who has worked on the Encyclopedia of Alabama, writes in to correct some information we included with an image of Confederate president Jefferson Davis‘s inauguration. I read the short information on the color lithograph of Davis’s inauguration. I presently have a book manuscript under review by the University of Alabama Press [...]

Click to continue →

Just for fun: Go to the New York Times online and punch “George Pickett” into the search engine there. What you’ll find is Encyclopedia Virginia‘s entry on the famous Confederate general. The Times has begun to syndicate our content, beginning with Pickett, in their Times Topic series. The goal for the Timesis to have such articles provide background knowledge and context [...]

Click to continue →

Here’s a story of an encyclopedia editor (that’s me) who tries his hand at editing Wikipedia, with mixed results (see Bix Beiderbecke), only to find five dollars at the end! In fact, it’s such an awesome story, it’s picked up by the Los Angeles Times. Except for the part about five dollars. They left that [...]

Click to continue →

In a Washington Post article from November, Rob Pegoraro investigates the burgeoning world of “augmented reality”–a concept that makes your mobile phone (as of right now it has to be phone working on the Android or iPhone platforms) into a tool that uncovers layers of information in the world around you. Let’s take this faux [...]

Click to continue →

Alert reader Sue Perdue, director of Documents Compass at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, saw the article we linked to yesterday on the business of encyclopedias and thought of Ball of Fire, the 1941 Howard Hawks romantic comedy starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. Above is the movie’s trailer. “Educators from all over the [...]

Click to continue →

A new article in Inside Higher Ed takes an in-depth look at the business of online encyclopedias, including Encyclopedia Virginia. Here’s a taste: Size Matters From a business standpoint, the most attractive aspect of Wikipedia might be the fact that unpaid volunteers create and edit most of the content. But to consumers, the site’s greatest [...]

Click to continue →

The Onion pretends to do what the Charlottesville CBS affiliate did for real. Go figure.

Click to continue →

Marijean Jaggers of Charlottesville has generously featured the EV blog on her “Blog of the Week” segment that airs every Tuesday on CBS-19. You can read about it here and watch the video here (don’t ask me who that shaven-headed weirdo with the Commie propaganda poster is, though). Jaggers is a blogger herself at STLWorkingMom, [...]

Click to continue →

For all you tweeters out there, you can now check us out on twitter at the @encyclopediaVA handle. Although we’ve been on twitter for a little while, we are just now starting to use it to send timely content about Virginia’s history and culture. Because of the flexibility of our content, we’re using the Twitter [...]

Click to continue →

Part of the whole point of putting Encyclopedia Virginia on the web is so that we can update our history as it changes and so that we can fix mistakes when they are pointed out to us. We were alerted to one possible mistake by a reader of our entry on the Jamestown property owner [...]

Click to continue →

At the Battle of the Crater on July 30, 1864, approximately 3,800 Union soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured, 1,327 of whom were members of the United States Colored Troops. One of those wounded was the man pictured above, Private Louis Martin of Company E, 29th U.S. Colored Infantry. He lost his right arm and [...]

Click to continue →

Encyclopedia entries are deceptively hard to write, and our entries on writers are perhaps the most challenging. You want to get all the interesting biographical stuff in there while also doing justice to the art. Who is this poet as a person, but also who is this poet as a poet? On a good day, [...]

Click to continue →

Ta-Nehisi Coates, whom I’ve had a habit of quoting lately (here and here and here), is still reading about the Civil War. But he, unlike us, is not waiting for Robert E. Lee. But to paraphrase Grant, I grow heartily weary of hearing of General Lee. I want to talk about us. How will we [...]

Click to continue →

As the opening sentence of a book review, this one is not terribly impressive: If you like history written as a novel, then Vicksburg 1863 by Winston Groom is for you. I enjoy reading history that way so it worked for me. It comes from the blog Civil War Et Al., which is penned by [...]

Click to continue →

The exciting news around these parts is that our Robert E. Lee entry came in last week (we’ve been waiting) and is currently being edited. Our Civil War section has been in progress for more than a year now, but you may have noticed that we still haven’t posted Lee or Stonewall Jackson or J. [...]

Click to continue →

Most but not all entries in Encyclopedia Virginia have a time line. (This one, for instance, does not.) At first, a time line seems like a simple thing; it takes a subject and reduces it to days, months, and years, succinctly outlining the life of a poet, or a governor, or a civil-rights activist. Still, [...]

Click to continue →