In this morning’s Washington Post, film reviewer Anne Hornaday writes about her own family’s connection to a name that recently has “bubble(d) up into the zeitgeist”: Ota Benga.
Benga was an African pygmy who, in 1904, was brought to the United States from the Congo, where his family had been massacred and he had been captured [...]

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Belle Boyd was one of the Confederacy’s most notorious spies. And her 1865 memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison, is full of so many outrageous stories that historians have long had difficulty knowing what to believe. Still, I find this paragraph from our entry to be extraordinary:
“Boyd was released [from prison] in December 1863, [...]

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I’m still stuck on that sentence from Mary Tucker Magill’s Virginia history textbook: “Generally speaking, the negroes proved a harmless and affectionate race, easily governed, and happy in their condition.” It reminded me of a passage from William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, a long, lyrical, devastating paragraph that comes near the end of [...]

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Kevin Levin, at his blog Civil War Memory, recently posted an image and an excerpt from an old Virginia history textbook. He was disgusted (and rightly so) by the book’s outlandish description of slavery, which emphasized feelings of “strong affection” between masters and their “cheerful” slaves.
I was thinking of this while proofreading our entry on [...]

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Miscegenation is all the rage! It’s been the focus of a couple of entries on this blog and will, in the coming week, be a concern of the weekly history radio show BackStory. (If you’re interested in the topic, be sure to check out the episode description and then email the show at backstory[at]virginia[dot]edu. They’ll [...]

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George Garrett died on Sunday at the age of 78. He was, in the words of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s blog, a “prolific author, screenwriter, professor, and beloved Charlottesville figure.” He was cofounder of the AWP, a national association of writers and writing programs. Perhaps most of all, he was a mentor to many, many [...]

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Meriah L. Crawford has written a great entry for us on the Virginia novelist Mary Spear Tiernan (1836–1891). Because I’ve been dwelling on Nat Turner of late, I was interested to learn that Tiernan based one of her characters on Turner. “Whoop-de-doo,” you might say, but this is a big deal because a) the character [...]

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I was sitting on my front porch the other morning reading Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. It was a beautiful morning—clear, warm, breezy—and with my coffee and a decent view of the Blue Ridge, I was in heaven. So it seemed appropriate that I stumbled onto this passage, in which a traveling salesman visits [...]

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Encyclopedia Virginia is getting its Civil War list up and running and, consequently, I am trying to get started on a whole list of my own Civil War reading. At the moment, that includes James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (whew, this is going to take me all summer!) and William Styron’s The Confessions of [...]

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The point of Encyclopedia Virginia is to collect what’s known. Sometimes, however, we stumble upon the heretofore unknown and that, for lack of a more sophisticated phrase, is pretty cool. Take the life of teacher, novelist, and historian Mary Tucker Magill (1830–1899). Our entry, by Dr. Mary Lynn Bayliss, asserts that Magill began her teaching [...]

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