Press Releases & Other Stories
On May 11, BackStory – which has aired on 130 stations and been downloaded through iTunes podcasts 1.3 million times – goes weekly thanks to a $350,000 production grant from NEH and additional funding of $460,000 from other sources.
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Wonder what we’ve been up to the last few years? This map shows VFH activity across the Commonwealth for the last five years.
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Diane Ober and her husband, John Alexander, have been doing an apprenticeship in the art of shape-note singing as part of the VFH Virginia Folklife Program.
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EV editor Brendan Wolfe’s blog post on the problems with a new edition of Virginia’s fourth-grade history textbook has been republished by the Washington Post.
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The Hampton Roads Daily Press cites Encyclopedia Virginia in a recent story about Irene Morgan, a Gloucester woman whose was a precursor to Rosa Parks in the civil rights struggle. Morgan will be honored with a highway marker in Middlesex, VA.
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Mark your calendars now! Please join us for the 2012 Fellows Reunion held during the Virginia Festival of the Book. All current and former VFH Fellows are invited to join us on Friday, March 23, at 4 p.m. in the City Space (downtown) for a Fellows’ panel discussion, followed by the annual reception for Fellows [...]
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Author and recent VFH Fellow Elizabeth Dowling Taylor tells Jon Stewart the story of Paul Jennings, one of James Madison’s slaves who ultimately purchased his own freedom.
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Virginia is recognizing the remarkable story of Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped slavery by mailing himself in a wooden box to Philadelphia and later lectured on the evils of slavery across New England and in Great Britain.
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Listen to Diane Ober and John Alexander as they demonstrate shape-note singing. Squares. Triangles. Circles. The shapes jump off the page at you, but it’s not a geometry lesson. Rather, it’s sheet music for a folk tradition called “shape-note singing.” University of Virginia employees Diane Ober and John Alexander, who are married, have been refining [...]
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