SEPARATED AT BIRTH: Lila Meade Valentine (1865–1921), Richmond suffragist, education reformer, and public-health advocate, and Dr. Mayim Bialik, a.k.a. television’s Blossom. In 2007 Bialik earned a doctorate in neuroscience and currently stars in CBS’s Big Bang Theory.

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SEPARATED AT BIRTH: Dude in Booker T. Washington’s car at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907, and dude on the poster for the documentary film Monty Python: Almost the Truth, the Lawyer’s Cut (2009). N.B.: I’m an editor and I can’t help it. So let me say that the single quotation mark in this post’s [...]

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I missed posting yesterday because Molly and I were staying at the lovely Morris House Hotel in Philadelphia, built in 1787 and—according to someone who might have awoken at 3:30 a.m. when things started going bump in the night—haunted. Was it George Washington looking for his teeth? Was it Thomas Jefferson? Whatever the case, we [...]

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SEPARATED AT BIRTH: Senator Thomas Hart Benton, of Missouri, and actor Tom Wilkinson

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SEPARATED AT BIRTH: Confederate general William Mahone and actor Hugh Grant

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SEPARATED AT BIRTH: Alexander Hamilton and Loki from The Avengers

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SEPARATED AT BIRTH: James A. Seddon, Confederate secretary of war, and Andrew Wyndham, executive producer of BackStory A respectable argument can be made that another member of the VFH staff looks even more like Seddon. His picture after the jump.

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Booker T. Washington and actor Dennis Haysbert

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The dead Mrs. Joseph (featured in this earlier post) and actor Willem Dafoe After the jump, it’s de-lovely.

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Confederate colonel William R. J. Pegram (whose death is chronicled here) looked an awful lot like Dustin Hoffman, right? An archivist at the Virginia Historical Society, Colin Woodward, thought so and even mailed the actor a copy of the above portrait. Hoffman replied: Dear Colin, I’ve been out of the country, just got back into [...]

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The blog wellitsafunnystory imagines the current University of Virginia imbroglio as a film. Hilary Swank (as Rector Helen Dragas), Melissa McCarthy (as President Teresa Sullivan), and Chevy Chase (as former president John Casteen) all have starring roles. But the site does not, for obvious reasons, cast King George VI of Great Britain as former vice [...]

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The University of Virginia Board of Visitors Vice Rector Mark Kington (left) has just resigned his position, and we were wondering whether he was a long lost sibling of Albert Frederick Arthur George, or King George VI of Great Britain (right). The resemblance is almost too much to bear. For the latest on the chaos [...]

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Ahead of this weekend’s release of The Raven, Yahoo!News wants us to be aware of all the “peculiar similarities” between the writer Edgar Allan Poe and the actor John Cusack: Cusack dove deep into Poe’s writing, hoping to get intimately in touch with the writer’s macabre spirit, but the two are actually more similar than Cusack [...]

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