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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 from [...]

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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 [...]

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Speaking of anniversaries, we’re four days away from October 16, the 150th anniversary of John Brown‘s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The West Virginia Archives & History has a new online presentation on the man and his famous attempt to start a slave rebellion. As anyone who has read about the raid [...]

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Supreme Court Justices are dashing off cheap novels in the guise of opinions. Chief Justice John Roberts, for instance, channels Sam Spade in a recent dissent: North Philly, May 4, 2001. Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a three-dollar steak. To which Terry Teachout [...]

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The Wall Street Journal reviews In Defense of Thomas Jefferson, a book that concludes, emphatically, that the male Jefferson family member who fathered Eston Hemings could have been any one of at least seven males. There were, [author William G. Hyland Jr.] notes, “two dozen-plus Jefferson males (with DNA markers in common) roaming Virginia at [...]

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Today is National Women’s Equality Day, in honor of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote. But wait, there’s more! The observance of Women’s Equality Day not only commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment, but also calls attention to women’s continuing efforts toward full equality. [...]

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With all the hoopla over the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, another anniversary has been lost: Hurricane Camille, which swept through central Virginia on August 19, 1969. Remember all the rain-soaked hippies up in New York? Thank Hurricane Camille. Here in Virginia, however, it rained a bit harder. Okay, a lot harder: Camille’s official rainfall total [...]

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