The photograph above, featured at the photo blog Shorpy, comes with the following caption: “Head of a Girl, 1905.” Hampton, Virginia. “Girl at elementary school affiliated with the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute.” Gum bichromate print by pioneering fine-art photographer Fred Holland Day (1864-1933), whose work we’ll be seeing more of every Sunday for the next [...]

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Frances Osborn Robb, a scholar who has worked on the Encyclopedia of Alabama, writes in to correct some information we included with an image of Confederate president Jefferson Davis‘s inauguration. I read the short information on the color lithograph of Davis’s inauguration. I presently have a book manuscript under review by the University of Alabama Press [...]

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New images of Edgar Allan Poe have surfaced, the Associated Press reports in a rather excitable article that calls the writer “vigorous” and “dashing.” The more robust Poe is captured in a small watercolor by A.C. Smith, one of just three surviving portraits of the author, which will be shown publicly for the first time [...]

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In a Washington Post article from November, Rob Pegoraro investigates the burgeoning world of “augmented reality”–a concept that makes your mobile phone (as of right now it has to be phone working on the Android or iPhone platforms) into a tool that uncovers layers of information in the world around you. Let’s take this faux [...]

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EV programmer Peter Hedlund recently visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and saw the above murals—of Washington’s Mount Vernon and Jefferson’ Monticello—by artist Kerry James Marshall. Although he holds both George Washington … and Thomas Jefferson in high regard, he challenges their legacy by toying with optical illusions within both landscapes. Figures of [...]

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In his recent military history, John Keegan writes, “The American Civil War is one of the most mysterious great wars of history . . .” We’re never done exploring that mystery, especially in these sesquicentennial years, and now the Library of Virginia offers a new and useful research tool: the Civil War Research Guide. The [...]

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Donna M. Lucey is Encyclopedia Virginia‘s new media editor, and she has a wonderful piece on the Smithsonian website right now. Called “Robert Morrison’s Montana,” it presents and annotates a funny, creepy, haunting, sad, and often insightful group of photographs from late-nineteenth-century Montana. They are the work of Robert C. Morrison, who came to Montana [...]

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Today I’ve been working on captions for images we will upload with an already published entry about the Chancellorsville Campaign. In this particular photograph, Union infantrymen in John Sedgwick’s Sixth Corps huddle together on the west bank of the Rappahannock River on April 29 or 30, 1863. Until the 1980s, the image was mis-credited to [...]

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I enjoyed the following bit of snark from the historian Gary W. Gallagher. He’s referring to the 1907 print Lee and His Generals by George Bagby Matthews (above). In suggesting that Matthews’s artistic skill was perhaps lacking and his choices sometimes odd (“Lee stands just a bit taller than twenty-five fellow generals, all of whom, [...]

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The man pictured above is James Branch Cabell, the Richmond-born author of fifty-two books, one of which, Jurgen (1919), was the subject of an obscenity suit in New York and briefly banned. And let’s face it, he looks like the sort of dude whose book might be banned for obscenity. The portrait is by Carl [...]

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