The Battle of the Crater will be examined on a PBS series: The tunnel that Union soldiers dug to blow a crater under Confederate defenses at Petersburg, Va., is not usually juxtaposed with, say, the Great Wall of China. But the Battle of the Crater makes the cut in the new PBS series “Ground War,” [...]

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I received an anonymous comment last night related to our Henry “Box” Brown entry: The date Henry Brown entered his box was March 29th, not March 23rd as written on this web page. While one might believe with all credibility that the 29th is the correct date (after all Brown writes in his own narrative [...]

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In the wake of Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s declaration of Confederate History Month and all the resulting hoopla, Ta-Nehisi Coates considers the memory of Robert E. Lee. In so doing, he quotes a lecture by Elizabeth Brown Pryor that aired on C-SPAN: It’s wrong to turn [Lee] into this unreal person. And I’ll tell you [...]

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Now showing at the Virginia Historical Society: Cold War Crisis: The U-2 Incident / January 16–May 30, 2010 On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over the Soviet Union by a surface-to-air missile. Francis Gary Powers—a civilian pilot flying for the Central Intelligence Agency—was unable to activate the self-destruct mechanism [...]

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The photograph above, featured at the photo blog Shorpy, comes with the following caption: “Head of a Girl, 1905.” Hampton, Virginia. “Girl at elementary school affiliated with the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute.” Gum bichromate print by pioneering fine-art photographer Fred Holland Day (1864-1933), whose work we’ll be seeing more of every Sunday for the next [...]

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Frances Osborn Robb, a scholar who has worked on the Encyclopedia of Alabama, writes in to correct some information we included with an image of Confederate president Jefferson Davis‘s inauguration. I read the short information on the color lithograph of Davis’s inauguration. I presently have a book manuscript under review by the University of Alabama Press [...]

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, after watching one of David Blight’s free online seminars on slavery and the Civil War, wonders about the economics of bondage. In particular, he asks his readers to explain why Southerners believed, before the war, that slavery would die if it weren’t allowed to expand into new U.S. territories. My basic read is [...]

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In a Washington Post article from November, Rob Pegoraro investigates the burgeoning world of “augmented reality”–a concept that makes your mobile phone (as of right now it has to be phone working on the Android or iPhone platforms) into a tool that uncovers layers of information in the world around you. Let’s take this faux [...]

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Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic writes about a trip to Virginia this past summer to visit Civil War battlefields: I pulled our rental car to the side of the road, and treated my son and nephew to an awkward impromptu lecture on the bravery of Sergeant Major Christian Fleetwood and Private Charles Veale. It was [...]

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In 1818 Thomas Jefferson declared the “objects” of an education at the University of Virginia. To wit: To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business. To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts in writing. To improve, [...]

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