Applying the humanities to contemporary human questions.
To mark the rebirth of BackStory as a weekly program, the History Guys set out to explore the earliest stages of life in America. They begin with a few of the basic assumptions we have about birth in America today, and spend the hour exploring how those assumptions came into being.
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VFH Fellow Kara Dixon Vuic says the American military has a long history of sanctioning prostitution, one that suggests much deeper concerns about its cultivation of a sexualized culture that can help to explain the recent Secret Service scandal.
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Last year, Richard Cohen penned a provocative piece in the Washington Post asking us to get over Robert E. Lee already. He’s “swaddled in myth, kitsch and racism,” Cohen wrote; a good general fighting for an evil cause. Cohen then asserted that “in that exotic place called the antebellum South, there were plenty of people [...]
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Except for McClellan’s defeat at Battle of Seven Pines–Fair Oaks, the war might have been over—and quickly! What would that have meant? And what does it mean that this didn’t happen?
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A lunchtime talk with VFH Fellow Robert T. Vinson Tuesday, May 15 at noon. Explore how Zulu people shaped political, social, and cultural transformations in the Atlantic world.
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The new exhibit “Sentimental Attachments” at the Brownsburg (Va.) Museum aims to provide visitors with more understanding of the ambiguities of race relations in the small Rockbridge County community before and after the Civil War. The exhibit is the work of Sascha Goluboff, associate professor of cultural anthropology at Washington and Lee University, and draws [...]
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Encyclopedia Virginia tells the story of Tsenacomoco, the political alliance of Virginia Indians who originally occupied the territory that the English settled and named Jamestown.
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Did you know that about 15 percent of Africans who traveled the Middle Passage did not survive the trip? this entry from EV combines first-person testimony and up-to-date statistics to create a harrowing depiction of the journey.
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This is exactly the story of Virginia. The historian Karen Kupperman writes of a number of people “who found themselves placed involuntarily in cross-cultural situations—often at radically different destinations from those they intended—where the ones who survived lived by their wits.”
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