I love to find an excuse to post artwork on this blog. Yesterday, on the occasion of his birthday, I found a painting of Stonewall Jackson, more or less by accident, and was pleased that the artist himself commented on the post. Today, on the occasion of her birthday, I thought I’d post some lovely [...]

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The Daily Mail has reprinted several photographs of Richard and Mildred Loving taken for Life magazine by Grey Villet while the couple fought in the courts for recognition of their marriage. The United States Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law. Twenty images show the tenderness and family support enjoyed by [...]

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As our entry makes clear, rain was a huge factor at the Civil War battle of Spotsylvania Court House in May 1864: The worst of [the fighting] occurred at an exposed portion of the line Confederates dubbed the “Mule Shoe” and a nearby a curve that came to be known as the “Bloody Angle.” Bodies [...]

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Here’s another image that carries forward the theme of sharks and the slave trade. (See also Watson and the Shark.) The Gulf Stream was painted by Winslow Homer in 1899, at a time when a Missouri congressman said that blacks were “almost too ignorant to eat,” and his colleague from Mississippi [click if for nothing [...]

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Might as well just keep going with the sharks, so here’s a painting, by the Boston-born artist John Singleton Copley, titled Watson and the Shark (1778). I think you’ll agree that it vividly depicts the dangers of a shark attack, but what’s notable is that it was painted at the height of the slave trade [...]

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The previous post noted that when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea created an anti-American propaganda film, it reached for images from the history of Virginia, in particular of slavery, to make its point. One of those images comes from the February 16, 1861, issue of the Illustrated London News and depicts a slave auction [...]

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We all know that Kim Jong-il died the other day, and being something of a Korea-phile (I lived in the Republic of Korea from 2003 until 2004) I spent some time in the arms of Google, hoping she might whisper me some sweet nothing. As it happens, she gave me this, a two-minute, anti-American propaganda [...]

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Today’s “This Day” post mentions the demise of James M. Ambler, a Virginia-born Navy surgeon who reluctantly volunteered for service with an Arctic expedition aboard the Jeannette, a ship commanded by George W. De Long. The ship became imprisoned by ice late in 1879, and Ambler did well to keep the crew not only alive [...]

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The problem with reenacting, I wrote earlier today, is that you’re supposed to enjoy it. You’re supposed to enjoy doing it and to enjoy watching it. And for an exercise designed to bring one closer to war, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Turns out that this was precisely the critique some critics [...]

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From a story on the Liljenquist Family Collection at the Library of Congress: The story starts 15 years ago in a Virginia park. The dad, Tom Liljenquist, has two boys in tow, about 5 and 3 years old, and the younger one plucks an object from the sandstone bed of a quiet creek. It’s a Civil [...]

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Today we published our entry on John White. You might know him as the governor of the Lost Colony at Roanoke and grandfather to Virginia Dare, the first child born to English parents in America. But White’s most important legacy are his watercolor depictions of the places and people he encountered at Roanoke in 1585–1586. [...]

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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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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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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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