Forgive a bit of self-indulgence here, but last August this blog lost one of its biggest fans when my dad, Tom Wolfe, of Davenport, Iowa, died. You may remember him for his silly notes or for his provocative (and perhaps not entirely defensible) comparisonof Robert E. Lee with Hitler and Stalin. Now I’ve published an essay in The Morning News about him, those silly notes, [...]

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Today’s Google Doodle (seen above) celebrates a Virginian (by birth): Ella Fitzgerald. The great jazz singer was born ninety-six years ago today in Newport News, but soon after her birth her parents separated and her mother moved the family to Yonkers, New York. Virginia’s loss but the world’s gain. If you’ve never seen it before, this [...]

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IMAGE: The Librarian (1566) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Wikipedia Commons)

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC6Ev5o5r7Y From The Hairpin: Prepare your jaws, everyone. Brad Paisley released a song called “Accidental Racist” and it’s a terrible thing. The song begins with this strange story about wearing a Confederate flag in public: “To the man that waited on me at the Starbucks down on Main, I hope you understand when I put on that [...]

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Last week we mentioned on these pages an unfortunate column written by the president of Emory University, who held up the three-fifths compromise at the Constitutional Convention as the sort of pragmatic politicking to which we ought to aspire today. The idea of the three-fifths compromise was to count enslaved men, women, and children as [...]

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In 1865, the citizens of Mississippi rejected the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery. It didn’t matter because the amendment, in December 1865, was ratified by three-quarters of the states anyway. See Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln for the full story. Here’s the thing about Mississippi, though. It finally got around to rubber-stamping the amendment [...]

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Everybody needs a break, and I’ve been taking a much-needed one while we at Encyclopedia Virginia work to meet a grant deadline. But it’s hard to ignore this from the president of Emory University. In his regular president’s letter for the university’s alumni magazine, James Wagner begins with the usual bromides about political polarization and [...]

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Not because this has anything to do with Virginia history, but because we’ve already posted about the Blue Marble and, this morning, the Black Marble, the above video is worth the time. Think of it as rounding out the trilogy. It begins with that famous prediction, by the British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, who wrote [...]

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Last week we celebrated the fortieth birthday of the so-called Blue Marble image of Earth, taken by Apollo 17 on its way to the Moon. Now, via the Atlantic, comes Black Marble: For three weeks spread out over April and October of this year, the Suomi NPP satellite (jointly of NASA and NOAA) scanned all [...]

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The famed “Blue Marble” view of Earth turns forty years old today. From Life.com: A large part of Blue Marble’s lasting appeal surely has something to do with the fact that the proportions and the features on display in the photo are so familiar. In a roughly square frame sits the almost perfectly round Earth [...]

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If all fifty states simultaneously seceded and declared war on each other, who would win? That question was recently posed on the crowd-sourcing website Quora, and one particularly long response—submitted by the marine, Iraq War veteran, and Texas native Jon Davis—offers up some good (well, kinda good) news for Virginia. In no-nonsense prose, Davis delivers what he [...]

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I offer up “I Hope Yer There,” a song that is seven years old now but just discovered by yours truly over the Thanksgiving holiday, for no other reason than it references not one but two people in the encyclopedia: Edgar Allan Poe and Nat Turner. How you build a song that finds room for [...]

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An interesting historical debate has broken out in the pages of the New York Times Book Review. A few weeks ago, John Jeremiah Sullivan reviewed Nicholson Baker‘s new collection, which includes the essay “Why I’m a Pacifist,” which, in turn, is a response to the hullabaloo that erupted on the publication of Human Smoke (2008), [...]

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Our colleague from BackStory, Eric Mennel, on why you should get out and vote …

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The above video, which aired on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long while. And because it features Louis C.K., one of the smartest, most provocative comedians working today, it’s not your average, sophomoric SNL fare. Take, for instance, the fact that it portrays a down-on-himself, decidedly [...]

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Election Day is tomorrow, and the above video does a nice job of relaying the anything-but-even progress in voting rights over the years. Although it covers a lot of territory in just three-and-a-half minutes, I noticed one gap worth filling in. The video notes the widespread, “unofficial” attempts at disenfranchising black citizens in the years [...]

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  Exorcist: The Situation Comedy, from filmschoolrejects.com. Happy Halloween!

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Dr. Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at wunderground.com, puts Sandy into historical perspective: In a stunning spectacle of atmospheric violence, Superstorm Sandy roared ashore in New Jersey last night with sustained winds of 90 mph and a devastating storm surge that crippled coastal New Jersey and New York. Sandy’s record size allowed the historic storm [...]

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  From the Atlantic: The America of Lincoln and the Civil War can feel like distant history, but every now and then, through the appearance of what Jason Kottke has called a “human wormhole,” we are confronted with the brevity of a century and a half. The above video captures this phenomenon succinctly. Here is a man, [...]

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As we already noted, on this day in 1789, Congress presented to the states for ratification twelve—not ten—amendments to the United States Constitution. The first two weren’t immediately ratified, meaning that today’s First Amendment was actually the original Third Amendment. Which is why this bit of rhetoric, from the blogger Andrew Sullivan, is ironic: America [...]

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On Friday we posted a (probably staged) photograph of a B-17 bomber crew in Virginia during World War II. The historian Henry Wiencek commented that his father flew on such bombers and then sent the above photograph: “Here’s how my dad fought the war.” He fought, in other words, inside what was called a Sperry [...]

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Apologies for being away from my post for a number of days, and I return now with the sad news that the Encyclopedia Virginia blog has lost one of its biggest fans: Tom Wolfe, of Davenport, Iowa. You may remember him for his silly notes or for his provocative (and perhaps not entirely defensible) comparison [...]

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On this day in 1931, the jazz cornetist Bix Beiderbecke ceased being mortal and transformed instead into one of jazz’s original and most enduring legends. I have connected Bix to Virginia previously in these pages; today I offer up a few words on his legacy, excerpted from the unpublished manuscript Finding Bix, in which I visit [...]

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This ad was brought to you by Steam Boat Veterans for Truth.

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It’s a slow Friday afternoon, and in spite of my earlier apology, I’m feeling a little ghoulish. You may already know about Charles Julius Guiteau, a thirty-nine-year-old crazy person who in 1881 assassinated President James A. Garfield, believing himself to have been appointed by God for the mission when Garfield refused to give him a [...]

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