The Bee newspaper in Danville, Virginia, announces [pdf] the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education on May 17, 1954. In an earlier post, I suggested that delay was the order of the day, and you can already see it happening. Danville’s school superintendent O. T. Bonner, whose lunch was interrupted by the [...]

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Henry Wiencek, an affiliate fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, gave a talk this week previewing his new book-in-progress about Thomas Jefferson and slavery. I was there, it was excellent, and you should give a listen. Henry is a wonderful speaker, and he may force you to confront a few uncomfortable truths about [...]

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This jaw-dropper of a story about a lynching in Houston, Texas, ran in the Los Angeles Times on June 21, 1928, and is notable for its wry and cynical tone. “In ordinary circumstances, it would have been just one of those things,” Harry Carr reported, but the city was hosting the Democratic National Convention at [...]

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As noted earlier, Louis Isaac Jaffé won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on this day in 1929. Here is an excerpt of the editorial cited by the judges: “An Unspeakable Act of Savagery.” It ran in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot on June 22, 1928. As the Democratic hosts prepare to rededicate themselves anew to fairness [...]

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Because it’s absolutely gorgeous, I wanted an excuse to use this image to accompany a blog post, but it didn’t work out. So I’m just going to put it up here with its caption. But by all means, go to the cooking entry to which it’s attached (or the fire entry) and start poking around. [...]

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I’m editing our entry on Indian languages, and this bit stood out: The paramount chief Powhatan probably understood long before the English arrived at Jamestown that children absorbed new languages faster than their elders. For this reason, in February 1608, he sent a boy named Namontack to live among the colonists. John Smith and Captain [...]

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Our entries are much more than just words. Media Editor Donna Lucey does an amazing job of curating accompanying images, and here’s one that really knocked me over when I read it. Titled “Image found at the Battle of High Bridge,” it accompanies our new Surrender at Appomattox entry. The caption reads: This ambrotype of [...]

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Why did the South get left behind economically after the Civil War? On another blog, a history professor speculates: Perhaps the most important factor in the South’s economic underdevelopment was the fact that emancipation, while a milestone in human freedom, was an economic calamity. There were approximately 4 million slaves, with an average value of [...]

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I happened upon an exchange of letters this week that I found remarkable. In 1735, a British government lawyer was routinely reviewing the business of Virginia’s General Assembly—making sure those unwashed colonists hadn’t really gone and done it this time—when he discovered a law so unfair, so unreasonable, that he demanded an explanation. What was [...]

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In honor of Martin R. Delany‘s birthday, here’s part one of an interesting video about this “magnificent life.”

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As reported earlier, today is the anniversary of the Battle of Williamsburg, fought in 1862 as part of Union general George B. McClellan‘s Peninsula Campaign. In the Rock Island Argus (one of my hometown newspapers) of May 13, McClellan is quoted as telling his wife, the former Mary Ellen Marcy, “The more we know the [...]

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The other day, Glenn Beck sat in front of some kind of fake old-fashioned television set and showed his audience clips of Glee. He declared that he could only watch the show with “stunned horror combined with a sense of admiring awe.” That’s exactly how I feel about the movie Gods and Generals (2003). There’s [...]

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In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, Eric Foner, the official stamp on his Pulitzer still wet, objects to the argument made by University of Virginia professor Gary Gallagher in his new book, The Union War. Shorter Gallagher: Northerners fought the Civil War to save the Union; emancipation became acceptable only once it became [...]

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Richard Cohen penned a provocative piece in the Washington Post this week asking us to get over Robert E. Lee already. He’s “swaddled in myth, kitsch and racism,” Cohen writes; a good general fighting for an evil cause.* The historian Brooks D. Simpson has a typically thoughtful reaction to the essay, tying in much of [...]

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For more on John A. McCausland‘s burning of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, watch the short video above, and check out the wonderful web archive In the Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the Civil War. There you can find: Jubal A. Early‘s written orders to burn the town; this engraving of the blaze that appeared in [...]

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As mentioned earlier, on this day in 1861 John McCausland accepted his first Civil War command. Almost sixty-six years later, the newspapers reported his death. (The dude was old! And he had a certain look about him, wouldn’t you say?) For no particular reason other than I love old newspapers and old headlines, here are [...]

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To catch you up: The Atlantic blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates declared the Civil War not to be tragic. (After all, it freed the slaves.) He criticized our sister program BackStory for acting as if it were, and BackStory responded about “the enormous waste of human life.” Yours truly, meanwhile, made a somewhat snarky remark suggesting that [...]

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, who recently linked to our black Confederates entry, now tells the world about our sister program BackStory‘s wonderful three-part series on the Civil War: The Civil War: 150 Years Later. Coates worries that the accepted premise of the BackStory programs is that the Civil War was a tragedy. He writes: It’s really simple [...]

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Today being the four hundred and fourth anniversary of the English arrival in the Chesapeake Bay just prior to the founding of Jamestown, I thought I’d hearken back to Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005), starring Colin Farrell as John Smith and what’s-her-name as Pocahontas. The movie is both gorgeous and utterly ridiculous, with increasingly [...]

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