It’s from our Battle of Fredericksburg entry: Burnside, meanwhile, found himself dealing with a recalcitrant Hooker. Which is always the worst, isn’t it? IMAGE: Joe Hooker from Harper’s Weekly, July 5, 1862

Click to continue →

If you look at our blog entries individually, you will see a “Welcome to reader-supported content” balloon toward the bottom of the page but above the comment box. This balloon and the badge underneath is part of a “micro-patronage” system that is currently under development to help content providers (newspapers, blogs, etc.) earn revenue so [...]

Click to continue →

Artist Rob Matthews binds Wikipedia’s featured articles in “dysfunctional physical form” as a way “to question its use as an internet resource.” The picture speaks for itself, I guess, but let me play devil’s advocate. For one, how does this “question” Wikipedia’s use as an Internet resource? Presuming one finds such a book intimidating and [...]

Click to continue →

From the London Review of Books: The best one-volume encyclopedia in the world used to be the Columbia Encyclopedia, first published by Columbia University Press in 1935. In our house we have the fifth edition, from 1993, and we still get it out occasionally to look up kings and queens and old-fashioned stuff like that. [...]

Click to continue →

The man pictured above is James Branch Cabell, the Richmond-born author of fifty-two books, one of which, Jurgen (1919), was the subject of an obscenity suit in New York and briefly banned. And let’s face it, he looks like the sort of dude whose book might be banned for obscenity. The portrait is by Carl [...]

Click to continue →

Encyclopedia Virginia (Beta) is now officially live. We’re adding content every week, and we’ll use this space in part to highlight newly posted entries. You can also check the blog’s sidebar for updated content, or subscribe to the encyclopedia’s RSS feed, which can be particularized to the kind of content you prefer to read. In [...]

Click to continue →

This week’s Virginia Vignette is about an escape from Libby Prison in Richmond during the Civil War. Around 109 Union officers tunneled out, with fifty-nine of them eventually reaching the safety of their own lines. The last two sentences of the Vignette prompted skepticism from some readers, however. Here’s what we wrote: A prison employee, [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

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 [...]

Click to continue →

The other day I was editing an entry about Ambrose E. Burnside, a Union general during the Civil War.* As you can tell from the photograph, this is the same Burnside from whom we get the term “sideburns.” Here’s the thing, though. Burnside may have been cool looking, but he wasn’t from Virginia; he was [...]

Click to continue →

The point of Encyclopedia Virginia is to collect what’s known. Sometimes, however, we stumble upon the heretofore unknown and that, for lack of a more sophisticated phrase, is pretty cool. Take the life of teacher, novelist, and historian Mary Tucker Magill (1830–1899). Our entry, by Dr. Mary Lynn Bayliss, asserts that Magill began her teaching [...]

Click to continue →