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Entries Tagged as 'Visual History'

How Do We Remember War?

December 2nd, 2008 by Brendan Wolfe · 1 Comment

How do we remember war?
According to Kent Gramm, the worst thing you can do is present war—in this instance, the Civil War—in terms that might make it attractive. (Or fun. Or honorable.) That would open you up to his accusation that you are living in a world of “fantasy, myth, and entertainment.”
According to Stephen Cushman, [...]

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Tags: Virginia History · Visual History

Fresh from the Field

July 10th, 2008 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

In light of that gruesome photograph of a dead Confederate at Petersburg, here is something I wrote for the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire at the very beginning of the Iraq War, when newspaper editors were furiously debating how graphic their coverage of the war could be . . .
The Associated Press recently moved a [...]

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Tags: Virginia History · Visual History

‘Here was a city of the dead’

July 1st, 2008 by Brendan Wolfe · No Comments

Last week, the blog Shorpy posted a series of photographs of the dead from the Civil War battlefield of Petersburg. Like the one above, they’re tough to look at and even tougher to consider fully for all their moral, political, social, military, and even aesthetic ramifications. There’s a lot going on, in other words.
The Shorpy [...]

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Tags: Around the State · Virginia History · Visual History

The Great Man’s Dirty Linen

June 24th, 2008 by Brendan Wolfe · 11 Comments

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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Tags: Inside the Encyclopedia · Virginia Literature · Visual History

On the Burned Ruins of Richmond

June 13th, 2008 by Brendan Wolfe · 2 Comments

I was in Richmond recently and I wondered aloud whether the city had been burned during the Civil War. This was, perhaps, a stupid question, but I’m from Iowa. So there you go. “Yes,” my companions patiently informed me, “Richmond had been burned to the ground”—but the passive voice, as they say, was used. And [...]

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Tags: Virginia History · Visual History

This Man is Not Edgar Allan Poe

April 29th, 2008 by Matthew Gaventa · 1 Comment

Beware captions.
I came across this portrait in some research on Poe, and was excited: there aren’t a wide variety of images of Poe available, and none from this early on in his life, which, given his time at the University of Virginia, was of particular interest for EV. The caption pleasantly informs us that [...]

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Tags: Virginia History · Virginia Literature · Visual History

The Archive in the Attic

April 14th, 2008 by Matthew Gaventa · No Comments

Many of the images that we will use in Encyclopedia Virginia have been taken from large institutional archives, like those of the Library of Congress, Library of Virginia, Virginia Historical Society, etc. There is no question that the encyclopedia would not be possible without their support, and without the time and efforts of their archivists [...]

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Tags: Inside the Encyclopedia · Visual History

Hidden Drama

April 10th, 2008 by Matthew Gaventa · 1 Comment

I may be biased (I almost certainly am), but I tend to think that some of our richest and most interesting material is in our pictures and photographs. Take the above photograph, which will accompany our entry on the Great Depression, as an example. It’s one of the thousands of images commissioned by the Federal [...]

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Tags: Around the State · Virginia History · Visual History

Can You Spot the Differences?

April 7th, 2008 by Matthew Gaventa · 1 Comment

Last week, Brendan shared a haunting photo of a bridge near Farmville, Virginia. As cataloging and sharing old photos is to some extent my chief responsibility around here, the photo—and its source, the photoblog Shorpy—immediately piqued my curiosity.
First, I wanted to know something about the provenance of the photograph. Knowing little about Shorpy, and unable [...]

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Tags: Inside the Encyclopedia · Virginia History · Visual History

A Haunted Bridge?

March 27th, 2008 by Brendan Wolfe · 2 Comments

This image of High Bridge showed up recently on Shorpy, a blog dedicated to historical photos. (Click on the photograph for a larger view.) Located a few miles east of Farmville in Prince Edward County, the bridge crosses the Appomattox River (and valley) and was built in 1852 for the Southside Railroad run from Petersburg [...]

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Tags: Virginia History · Visual History