We have just published our entry on John Smith. Obviously, we all know about Smith: a short and stubby man whose name, by virtue of its almost exaggerated ordinariness, serves to underscore his superhuman importance in the history of Virginia. I mean, c’mon. Who among us knows much of anything about the more eccentrically named [...]

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Yesterday we posted our entry on William Strachey. If you’re not already familiar, Strachey was aboard the Sea Venture, a ship bound for Jamestown in 1609 that almost sank in a storm and instead washed up on the Bermudas. Strachey’s account of that adventure is believed to have been important source material for Shakespeare’s play [...]

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This week we published our entry on the Starving Time, which refers to the winter of 1609–1610, when fully three-quarters of the colonists at Jamestown died of starvation and starvation-related diseases. There were a few arrow-related deaths in there, as well, the English being at war with the Powhatans, after all. This helps to explain [...]

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Today we published our entry on John White. You might know him as the governor of the Lost Colony at Roanoke and grandfather to Virginia Dare, the first child born to English parents in America. But White’s most important legacy are his watercolor depictions of the places and people he encountered at Roanoke in 1585–1586. [...]

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We published our entry on the early Jamestown settlement today. The story of the first permanent English colony in America is a long one and so packed with details that some of the most fascinating stuff can get lost. So let me call your attention to this moment from deep inside the entry: In June [...]

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We just posted our entry on the surrender at Appomattox, certainly one of the most famous scenes of the Civil War if not of all American history. We already have an entry on the Appomattox Campaign that culminated in the surrender, and we have entries on Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. So I [...]

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We recently published our entry on the First Anglo-Powhatan War, which began just prior to the  Starving Time in 1609* and ended, more or less, with the marriage of Pocahontas in 1614. One interesting aspect of the entry is that it covers an event not all scholars agree even happened. Which is to say that [...]

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We just published our entry on the Roanoke Colonies. For those of you tempted to say that this is North Carolina’s business and not Virginia’s, look closely at the map above. This was Virginia before Virginia was Virginia. And arguably, the adventures at Jamestown can’t be understood absent the context of Roanoke. Plus, it’s just [...]

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It’s July 1, 2009, which means that 146 years ago today the Army of Northern Virginia tripped over some Union cavalry stationed at a small, college-friendly crossroads called Gettysburg. The Confederate troops were from A. P. Hill‘s corps and included men in Henry Heth‘s division. Yes, they had been looking for shoes, but they found [...]

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I grew up in a neighborhood of Davenport, Iowa, called McClellan Heights. I delivered papers along McClellan Boulevard. George B. McClellan, in his day, was the man, and I’m sure that neighborhoods and streets across the country still bear his name. (Just as there is a Pershing Street in Davenport and an Eisenhower Elementary School.) [...]

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Massive Resistance represented something like Virginia’s last stand against desegregation. State leaders actually closed public schools rather than desegregate them as the U.S. Supreme Court, beginning with its Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, had required. How to justify such a move? By the time the General Assembly met in January 1956, key [...]

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Our Jefferson Davis entry has been published on the site. I like this bit of drama from Davis’s early career: Davis missed the Black Hawk War (1832) due to illness—Lincoln, however, battled the Sac and Fox tribes as a member of the Illinois militia—but returned in time to escort the Indian chief into captivity. (Davis [...]

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We’re going to start using this space to regularly spotlight new Encyclopedia Virginia entries. Today, it’s the Rye Cove Cyclone, about a tornado that struck a Scott County school in 1929, inspiring a country music song. After the disaster, a relief train took some of the injured to Clinchport for treatment. Others were taken by [...]

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