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Entries Tagged as 'Virginia History'

In the Cold Cold Night

October 20th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

Today’s “This Day” post mentions the demise of James M. Ambler, a Virginia-born Navy surgeon who reluctantly volunteered for service with an Arctic expedition aboard the Jeannette, a ship commanded by George W. De Long. The ship became imprisoned by ice late in 1879, and Ambler did well to keep the crew not only alive [...]

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Tags: Virginia History · Visual History

The Secret Life of a Modern-Day Johnny Reb

September 8th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · 1 Comment

Last week, Andrew Sullivan’s mega-popular blog The Dish posted an excerpt of a short essay by Lewis McCrary about Civil War reenacting. McCrary (pro-reenacting) was responding to a long lecture (pdf) given by Harvard president and Civil War historian Drew Gilpin Faust (anti-reenacting). I, in turn, responded to McCrary’s response by writing an e-mail to [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

Looks Like Fun! and Other Civil War-Related Problems

August 31st, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

The problem with reenacting, I wrote earlier today, is that you’re supposed to enjoy it. You’re supposed to enjoy doing it and to enjoy watching it. And for an exercise designed to bring one closer to war, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Turns out that this was precisely the critique some critics [...]

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Tags: Virginia History · Visual History

One of a Kind

July 28th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · 1 Comment

From a story on the Liljenquist Family Collection at the Library of Congress: The story starts 15 years ago in a Virginia park. The dad, Tom Liljenquist, has two boys in tow, about 5 and 3 years old, and the younger one plucks an object from the sandstone bed of a quiet creek. It’s a Civil [...]

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Tags: Virginia History · Visual History

On the Difficulty of Reenacting (Cont’d)

July 13th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

The above video considers the idea of slave reenacting at Colonial Williamsburg. A few years ago, I wrote about my own questions and skepticism regarding such historical interpretation, and like the folks who made the video, I came away more or less convinced. (Via Kevin Levin)

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Tags: Virginia History

In Which We Delve Far Too Deeply into Petty Augers, Only to Find No One Is Left Reading

July 12th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · 2 Comments

The other day, alert reader Marc Anderson noticed the phrase “Petty Auger” in one of Landon Carter’s diary entries. “I’m assuming the transcriber was not familiar with near the same name ‘periauger’? … the boat,” Anderson wrote, referring to the fact that the word means dugout canoe, such as what is being constructed by the [...]

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Tags: Feedback · Landon Carter's Diary · Virginia History

A Few Words from the Wise

June 7th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

Perhaps, like me, you have only just opened your copy of The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It (Library of America), then you are behind. It’s June and we’re already halfway through the first year—which means that a speech given by Henry A. Wise in Richmond on June 1, 1861, [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

Speaking of Noble Causes

June 6th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

A faithful reader and commenter on our Facebook page made mention to a “noble cause”; he was referring either to the National D-Day Memorial or to World War II itself. I’m not sure, but either way it got me to thinking about Paul Fussell’s book

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Tags: Virginia History

The Romance of War (Cont’d)

June 6th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

This is an excerpt of a longer online conversation. The first excerpt is here. To read the whole thing, click on the links at the end. Dear Brendan, To give Band of Brothers credit, it does present instances of American soldiers killing prisoners. And yet even there the moralizing is heavy-handed. There is always the [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

The Romance of War

June 6th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · 1 Comment

Today’s “This Day” post reminded me that a couple years ago, I engaged University of Virginia professor Ed Lengel in an online conversation about his book To Conquer Hell, about the World War I battle of the Meuse-Argonne. I’ll reprint two parts, and you can click on the rest at the end of this post [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

‘I woke up and there was the policeman’

June 2nd, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

ABC News reports on Loving v. Virginia in 1967.

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Tags: Virginia History

This History Will Curl Your Toes

June 1st, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · 1 Comment

If you’re like my wife, then after reading today’s “This Day” post, you’ll give me kind of a queer look and say, “That’s a little dark.” And it is. I know. But to really understand the first English colony called Virginia—by which I mean the one on Roanoke—then you need to wrap your head around [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

The Art of the Possible

May 27th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

The other day a friend passed along a link to the “6 Civil War Myths Everyone Believes (That Are Total B.S.)” Yes, it’s from Cracked magazine, but it doesn’t present itself as parody; it’s not even funny. Instead, it’s smug and know-it-all-y with a dash of foul language intended (I assume) to signal some mad [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

Young Widow (Free at Last)

May 26th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

Today’s “This Day” post celebrates the second marriage of Lizinka Campbell Brown, or “my wife, the widow Mrs. Brown,” as General Ewell called her. Husband No. 1, James Percy Brown, committed suicide in 1844, but as you might expect, there is more to the story. This comes from Campbell Brown’s Civil War (2001) by Terry [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

To Hang or Not to Hang?

May 25th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

Today’s “This Day” post raises the question of whether John H. Winder—who was in charge of the Confederate prison system that included Andersonville—was a war criminal. He died before the surrender, but his subordinate, Henry Wirz, did hang. Our entry on Winder does an evenhanded job, I think, of considering this prickly question: Historians, meanwhile, [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

You’re a racist! No, you’re a racist!

May 24th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

Turns out that May 24, 1900, is a popular date among some Republicans who are sensitive to charges that they are insensitive when it comes to race. I point you to the Internet meme in which far-right activists post a time line of ignominious moments in the history of the Democratic Party. May 24 is [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

How the Slavery Bubble Went Pop (Cont’d)

May 23rd, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

In an earlier post, the historian Henry Wiencek argued against the proposition that emancipation in 1865 was “an economic calamity” for Southern slaveholders. But this would only be true, Wiencek wrote, if the planters had bought each one of their slaves. Losing such a significant investment might, indeed, be calamitous. Except that they hadn’t needed [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

No Good Deed

May 23rd, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

In looking for newspaper reports ahead of the big secession referendum, I ran across this, from the Richmond Enquirer (May 10, 1861): Catholicism and Slavery Both to be Destroyed. Like Popery, Slavery is incompatible with the spirit of the age, or in other words, with liberty and civilization. Their progress is at an end, and [...]

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Tags: Virginia History

On Our (Awfully) Peculiar Institution

May 18th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · 1 Comment

The idea of this post is juxtaposition. (It’s also about burying the lede, so please read the whole thing!) First, there’s the image above, from 1863, of a former slave who enlisted in the United States Army. (No black Confederate, this guy. Go figure.) And then there’s this, from The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tennessee: [...]

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Tags: Inside the Encyclopedia · Virginia History

‘It’s the honest to goodness truth’

May 18th, 2011 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

With the Brown v. Board and Plessy v. Ferguson anniversaries back to back this week, I thought it appropriate to highlight this interview that Thurgood Marshall gave Mike Wallace back in … well, I don’t know when exactly. But it’s clearly after he successfully argued Brown but before he was appointed to the Supreme Court. [...]

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Tags: Virginia History