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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On on the occasion of her birthday, here’s a bonus fact about Constance Cary Harrison: she seems to have been responsible for convincing the poet Emma Lazarus to pen her famous sonnet, “The New Colossus,” which is engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Harrison herself told the story years later. She approached [...]

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The Moton school strike, in Farmville, Virginia, led to the court case Dorothy Davis, et al. v. County School Board Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia, which, in turn, was bundled with four other cases and heard by the United States Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The video above [...]

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We just published our entry on the Roanoke Colonies. For those of you tempted to say that this is North Carolina’s business and not Virginia’s, look closely at the map above. This was Virginia before Virginia was Virginia. And arguably, the adventures at Jamestown can’t be understood absent the context of Roanoke. Plus, it’s just [...]

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blogger and correspondent for the Atlantic, calls attention to Encyclopedia Virginia‘s new entry on the controversial subject of black Confederates. According to our contributor, Jaime Amanda Martinez, “Black Confederates is a term often used to describe both enslaved and free African Americans who filled a number of different positions in support of [...]

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This weekend I thought to myself, “Whatever happened to the V-roys?” Those guys rocked pretty hard back when I was in grad school, and they wore skinny ties, and their producer was Steve Earle. A lot of good in that package, but, alas, they broke up anyway. So it turns out lead singer Scott Miller [...]

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The Battle of the Crater will be examined on a PBS series: The tunnel that Union soldiers dug to blow a crater under Confederate defenses at Petersburg, Va., is not usually juxtaposed with, say, the Great Wall of China. But the Battle of the Crater makes the cut in the new PBS series “Ground War,” [...]

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I received an anonymous comment last night related to our Henry “Box” Brown entry: The date Henry Brown entered his box was March 29th, not March 23rd as written on this web page. While one might believe with all credibility that the 29th is the correct date (after all Brown writes in his own narrative [...]

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In the wake of Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s declaration of Confederate History Month and all the resulting hoopla, Ta-Nehisi Coates considers the memory of Robert E. Lee. In so doing, he quotes a lecture by Elizabeth Brown Pryor that aired on C-SPAN: It’s wrong to turn [Lee] into this unreal person. And I’ll tell you [...]

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Now showing at the Virginia Historical Society: Cold War Crisis: The U-2 Incident / January 16–May 30, 2010 On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane was shot down over the Soviet Union by a surface-to-air missile. Francis Gary Powers—a civilian pilot flying for the Central Intelligence Agency—was unable to activate the self-destruct mechanism [...]

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