The exhibit Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty opens today at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. This has been a huge undertaking by the historians at Monticello, and the New York Times has pronounced their efforts to be good: The contradictions in notions of liberty could not be more [...]

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The Daily Mail has reprinted several photographs of Richard and Mildred Loving taken for Life magazine by Grey Villet while the couple fought in the courts for recognition of their marriage. The United States Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law. Twenty images show the tenderness and family support enjoyed by [...]

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Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day! The University of Virginia—and Encyclopedia Virginia, too—is observing the federal holiday, while the administration of Washington and Lee University has decided to take a pass. This has caused some consternation, as the Washington Post reports. While the university has scheduled programming to honor King, some students are concerned that [...]

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Last year, upon the release of Five Ponds Press’s fourth-grade textbook, Our Virginia, and its unfavorable write-up in the Washington Post, the history nerds of Virginia—which is to say, pretty much everybody—mobilized into a mass orgy of righteous fact-checking. I was right there with them, of course, shocked to learn that Sir Walter Raleigh had [...]

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The Onion has just published a new commentary by George Washington: When I pictured the future back in the 18th century, I have to admit this isn’t quite what I had in mind. Sure, there have been tons of impressive technological advancements, but I always thought that by the year 2012 everyone would eat their [...]

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As our entry makes clear, rain was a huge factor at the Civil War battle of Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864: The worst of [the fighting] occurred at an exposed portion of the line Confederates dubbed the “Mule Shoe” and a nearby a curve that came to be known as the “Bloody Angle.” Bodies [...]

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In my earlier post on John Lewis & sharks, one of the creepier things I linked to was a discussion in which some political commenters joked about actually being the sharks who fed off the bodies of enslaved Africans during the Middle Passage. Turns out this is not a new joke; in fact, it was [...]

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Last week, in the course of working on an entry about slave ships and the Middle Passage, I had occasion to write the following paragraph: In the water, there were often sharks, which followed the ships in warm waters, feeding off refuse. “When dead Slaves are thrown over-board,” the Dutch merchant William Bosman wrote  in [...]

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Virginia history is turning up everywhere. On The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night, former VFH fellow Elizabeth Dowling Taylor talks about her new book, A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons. Watch the video and you’ll even hear Jon Stewart speak the words “Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.” Oh, [...]

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We’ve all heard how John Rolfe was the first to announce the arrival of Africans to Virginia. In a letter to Sir Edwin Sandys in January 1620, Rolfe tells of how “a Dutch man of Warr” landed at Point Comfort bearing “not any thing but 20. and odd Negroes.” Well, it turns out that ship [...]

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On his blog at the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes that “Racists—and those who exploit racism—are rarely about the business of openly declaring themselves as such.” He finds especially egregious Southerners who, before the Civil War, exalted the “great moral truth of slavery” only to hide behind states’ rights after they lost. He also cites the [...]

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The previous post noted that when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea created an anti-American propaganda film, it reached for images from the history of Virginia, in particular of slavery, to make its point. One of those images comes from the February 16, 1861, issue of the Illustrated London News and depicts a slave auction [...]

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We all know that Kim Jong-il died the other day, and being something of a Korea-phile (I lived in the Republic of Korea from 2003 until 2004) I spent some time in the arms of Google, hoping she might whisper me some sweet nothing. As it happens, she gave me this, a two-minute, anti-American propaganda [...]

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It’s a tough time for Civil War monuments, apparently. On December 11, NBC29 in Charlottesville reported that the city’s equestrian Robert E. Lee monument had been vandalized, possibly by the Occupy protestors who had been living in the surrounding park. One historian declared this to be “a stupid and disturbing act.” It certainly was witless, [...]

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Yesterday I linked to an anecdote about the slave trade that was not for the faint of heart. It came from Marcus Rediker’s excellent book The Slave Ship: A Human History, a book in which he tells another story, this time about a slaver out of Bristol, Rhode Island, named James D’Wolf (or DeWolf or, [...]

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A heart-stopping anecdote from The Slave Ship: A Human History (2007) by Marcus Rediker (pp. 88–90): The fishing village at the mouth of the Formosa River usually bustled with activity, but on this day in 1763 it was eerily quiet. Three people in a small canoe had come from far away and did not know [...]

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80: The approximate percentage of enslaved Africans among the total number of people who embarked for the Americas between 1500 and 1820. (Source) 12.5 million: The approximate number of enslaved Africans transported to the Americas between 1500 and 1866. (Source) 35,000: The maximum number of enslaved Africans brought to the area that was or would [...]

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What kind of slaveowner was Thomas Jefferson? Two comments recently attached to this post offer two very different views. The first comes from a reader who identifies him-/herself only as “Bridge”: I’ve been writing a very extensive paper on Thomas Jefferson. He’s not what you should consider a slave driver. His best friend throughout his [...]

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An incomplete and unrealistically negative picture of slavery is pervasive in the culture of this country; it is deliberately perpetrated in order to create the perception of slaveowners as inhuman and total evil — and, by association, the entire Confederacy, thus making the South “deserving” of the destruction by the righteous army of the north. [...]

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A news report over the holiday tells us that William Kelso, the archaeologist who discovered the fort at Jamestown and wrote about it in Jamestown: The Buried Truth (2008), is now “certain” he has discovered the site of the church where the minister Richard Bucke married Pocahontas and John Rolfe. She was “married right here, [...]

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