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 on [...]

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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 that [...]

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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 scenario: [...]

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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 only [...]

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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, by reading, his [...]

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Apparently the Whig Party is back:
The Modern Whig Party is like its namesake, only with fewer frock coats. The party was conceived in 2007 by active-duty service members in Iraq and Afghanistan, who then started recruiting nonmilitary members when they came back home. They resurrected the old Whigs’ symbol, the owl, and chiseled out a [...]

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Perhaps because the good old days of “sir” and “ma’am” (and states’ rights and slavery?) are gone.
The Chronicle of Higher Education profiles something called the Abbeville Institute, founded by an Emory University philosophy professor, Donald W. Livingston (pictured above), and named for the birthplace of über states’-rights and slavery advocate John C. Calhoun.
The secretive group, [...]

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A reader objects to our image caption describing Northern depictions of the capture of Confederate president Jefferson Davis at the end of the Civil War. After Davis was finally tracked down by Union cavalry in Georgia and hauled back to Fort Monroe in Virginia, many Northern newspapers reported that he had been disguised in women’s [...]

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Feedback from a reader of our Buck v. Bell entry whose aunt, like Carrie Buck, was institutionalized at the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded in Lynchburg:
I have an Aunt that was placed at this same place for the same reason,she will be 87 next month, she is the only one left [...]

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A new podcast from the outgoing BackStory producer Rachel Quimby looks at the surprising origins of the song “John Brown’s Body.”
150 years ago this October, the terrorist/hero John Brown raided the armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. By December 1859, his body lay a-moulderin’ in the grave, a fact quickly memorialized in the famous ditty known [...]

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