NewsThe Woman Who Refused to “Obey”
Sarah Harrison Blair offers a tantalizing glimpse of unlikely female agency in colonial Virginia. She was the daughter of wealthy Surry County tobacco planter, trader, and land speculator Benjamin Harrison II. By the time of Sarah’s birth in 1670, the Harrisons were already a political dynasty in the making. Her father served in the House of […]
News“Like Reaching for the Moon”
Before Greta Thunberg, before Emma González, before Malala Yousafzai, there was Barbara Johns. Johns kickstarted America’s student-led movement for civil rights in education in 1951, when she launched a walkout of her fellow students at the all-Black Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville. She was sixteen at the time. She planned the walkout to […]
NewsThe Ledger and the Chain with Joshua Rothman
On June 29, our Encyclopedia Virginia presented this conversation with Joshua Rothman, author of The Ledger and the Chain: How the Domestic Slave Trade Shaped America, and Patti Miller, editor …
NewsJuneteenth
As the nation and Virginia prepares to celebrate Juneteenth, our new entry by Lauranett Lee takes a look at how the poignant celebration of the belated emancipation of the Black residents of Galveston, Texas, became a nationwide holiday incorporating a number of Freedom Day traditions, including those celebrated in Virginia. And while Juneteenth lays claim to being […]
NewsFounding Fathers, Mothers, and Others
Warren G. Harding is credited with coining the term “Founding Fathers” to refer to the men who led the American Revolution and “dedicated a new republic to liberty and justice,” as he said in a 1916 speech to the Republican National Convention. There’s more than a little irony here. Harding was one of our least presidential […]
NewsAn especially malevolent form of American entrepreneurship
“Slave trader.” It’s one of the most loathsome expressions in the English language. Even enslavers claimed to recoil at that designation in the era when slavery flourished. Andrew Jackson took umbrage at being called a “negro-trader” during the bitter presidential election of 1828, even though the slaves he bought and sold as a young man […]
NewsThe 70th Anniversary of the Moton School Walkout
How student activism in Farmville, Virginia instigated the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1952-1954) decision to desegregate public schools
NewsA Song by Any Other Name
What’s in a name? In the case of the now-retired state song of Virginia, a lot. The tale of the twisting, somewhat torturous history of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” tells us a lot about Lost Cause mythology, half-hearted attempts to erase the stain of racism, and what true reconciliation requires. “Carry Me Back […]
NewsThe Virginia Writers Project
By Nora Pehrson Just last week, Congress approved the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARP), with it designating $135 million in federal funds to the National Endowment for the …
NewsThe Remarkable Journey of Elizabeth Keckly
Few stories in Encyclopedia Virginia are more dramatic than that of Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly. Born into slavery in Dinwiddie Courthouse, in the Piedmont region of Virginia, during the presidency of James Monroe, by the time that Abraham Lincoln entered the White House in 1861, not only was Keckly a free woman, but she was also Washington, D.C.’s most […]
NewsThis Small Garden Is Half My World
Celebrating the birthday of Anne Spencer, a writer of the Harlem Renaissance who lived and worked in segregated Lynchburg, Virginia
NewsBernard Cohen and the Legacy of Loving
Bernard Cohen, one of the two lawyers who successfully took on one of the last laws underpinning legal segregation in the landmark Loving v. Virginia case, died on October 12… Read More»
