In this morning’s Washington Post, film reviewer Anne Hornaday writes about her own family’s connection to a name that recently has “bubble(d) up into the zeitgeist”: Ota Benga.
Benga was an African pygmy who, in 1904, was brought to the United States from the Congo, where his family had been massacred and he had been captured [...]

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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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The name of the publication is Encyclopedia Virginia, which assumes that the subjects of our articles are connected to the state in some way. Which is a safe assumption, of course, but those connections are more tenuous for some than for others. Take Martin R. Delany. Here’s an early draft of the introduction to our [...]

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The novelist Marilynne Robinson, in Amherst Magazine, refers to a different place but speaks, I think, to the spirit behind Encyclopedia Virginia:
I’ve always felt that people somehow immortalize themselves in a landscape, that the mere fact of a specific human presence in a place leaves it changed. The earliest American poetry is haunted by the [...]

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Kevin Levin, at his blog Civil War Memory, recently posted an image and an excerpt from an old Virginia history textbook. He was disgusted (and rightly so) by the book’s outlandish description of slavery, which emphasized feelings of “strong affection” between masters and their “cheerful” slaves.
I was thinking of this while proofreading our entry on [...]

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Yesterday’s blog post included the remarkable fact that, after the Civil War, Jefferson Davis and his brother Joseph sold their Mississippi plantation to one of their former slaves, Benjamin Montgomery. The transaction was illegal and therefore secret, and the price was a whopping $300,000. According to this inflation calculator, that’s about $4 million in today’s [...]

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Miscegenation is all the rage! It’s been the focus of a couple of entries on this blog and will, in the coming week, be a concern of the weekly history radio show BackStory. (If you’re interested in the topic, be sure to check out the episode description and then email the show at backstory[at]virginia[dot]edu. They’ll [...]

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In Pt. 1, we moaned about the difficulty of making fine historical distinctions in the space of a mere 200 words and then used, as an example, a distinction that—let’s face it—wasn’t particularly fine at all. The “multitudinous” Moncure Conway did not, in fact, storm a Boston jail in 1854 or otherwise “participate” in activities [...]

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Each week, Encyclopedia Virginia publishes a feature called Virginia Vignettes. These are short paragraphs highlighting some bit of Virginia history and are often, though not always, culled from entries we are working on for the encyclopedia. You can keep up with the Vignettes by regularly visiting the website, by submitting your name to our mailing [...]

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Meriah L. Crawford has written a great entry for us on the Virginia novelist Mary Spear Tiernan (1836–1891). Because I’ve been dwelling on Nat Turner of late, I was interested to learn that Tiernan based one of her characters on Turner. “Whoop-de-doo,” you might say, but this is a big deal because a) the character [...]

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