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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After a few posts about John Brown, it seems only right to post this gorgeous photo of Harpers Ferry from 1865. The print is in the Library of Congress, but we’ve taken this digital version from the excellent historical photo blog Shorpy, where you might enjoy readers’ observations on the bridge as well as modern [...]

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I have no interest in making any partisan avowals here, only to note (as I did earlier) the interesting re-emergence of secession and nullification in the political lexicon. Our entry on states’ rights should be up soon. Meanwhile, our entry on Gettysburg is up, and it includes the above photo of three Confederate prisoners. The [...]

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This week’s Virginia Vignette is about an escape from Libby Prison in Richmond during the Civil War. Around 109 Union officers tunneled out, with fifty-nine of them eventually reaching the safety of their own lines. The last two sentences of the Vignette prompted skepticism from some readers, however. Here’s what we wrote: A prison employee, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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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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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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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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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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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 [...]

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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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