http://encyclopediavirginia.org http://encyclopediavirginia.org/img/EV_Logo_sm.gif This is the url http://encyclopediavirginia.org The first and ultimate online reference work about the Commonwealth /Beall_John_Y_1835-1865 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:51:29 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Beall_John_Y_1835-1865 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:51:29 EST]]> /Andros_Sir_Edmund_1637-ca_1714 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:20:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Andros_Sir_Edmund_1637-ca_1714 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:20:32 EST]]> /Beverley_Robert_bap_1635-1687 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:47:54 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Beverley_Robert_bap_1635-1687 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:47:54 EST]]> /Bennett_Richard_bap_1609-ca_1675 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:43:51 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bennett_Richard_bap_1609-ca_1675 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:43:51 EST]]> /Belle_Isle_Prison Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:36:24 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Belle_Isle_Prison Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:36:24 EST]]> /Burwell_Lewis_1711_or_1712-1756 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:26:22 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Burwell_Lewis_1711_or_1712-1756 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 11:26:22 EST]]> /Blair_John_ca_1687-1771 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:06:57 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Blair_John_ca_1687-1771 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:06:57 EST]]> /Braxton_Carter_1736-1797 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:03:10 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Braxton_Carter_1736-1797 Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:03:10 EST]]> /Blair_James_ca_1655-1743 Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:37:40 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Blair_James_ca_1655-1743 Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:37:40 EST]]> /Castle_Thunder_Prison Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:37:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Castle_Thunder_Prison Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:37:17 EST]]> /Claiborne_William_1600-1679 Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:32:02 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Claiborne_William_1600-1679 Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:32:02 EST]]> /Culpeper_Thomas_second_baron_Culpeper_of_Thoresway_1635-1689 Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:12:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Culpeper_Thomas_second_baron_Culpeper_of_Thoresway_1635-1689 Thomas Culpeper, second baron Culpeper of Thoresway, was a governor of Virginia (1677–1683) and a proprietor of the Northern Neck. In 1649, the soon-to-be-exiled King Charles II granted Culpeper's father and six others ownership of the Northern Neck in Virginia but in the end was not able to make good on the gift. In the meantime, the younger Culpeper served the king as governor of the Isle of Wight and vice president of the Council for Foreign Plantations. In 1681, Culpeper, who already had permission from the king to collect rents from the Northern Neck, secured five-sixths ownership of the land, a claim he was forced to surrender when the Virginia colonists protested. Culpeper became the colony's governor in 1677 but was content to do so absentee until late in 1679, when Charles II forced him to sail to Virginia. There, he acted on the king's instructions by curtailing the power of the General Assembly, authorizing a series of regular taxes, including on tobacco exports, and, generally, clarifying the colony's subordinate relationship with England. Culpeper left Virginia in economic crisis and was replaced in 1683, but he continued to purchase land, and renewed his Northern Neck claim in 1688. The proprietary eventually descended to the family of his son-in-law, Thomas Fairfax, fifth baron Fairfax of Cameron. After supporting William of Orange during the Glorious Revolution (1688), Culpeper died in 1689.
Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:12:00 EST]]> /Mahone_William_1826-1895 Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:23:22 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Mahone_William_1826-1895 Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:23:22 EST]]> /Antilynching_Law_of_1928 Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:52:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Antilynching_Law_of_1928 Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:52:32 EST]]> /Beauregard_G_T_1818-1893 Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:49:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Beauregard_G_T_1818-1893 G. T. Beauregard (also known as Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard) was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865) and, after helping engineer victory at the First Battle of Manassas on July 21, 1861, one of the Confederacy's first war heroes. Raised in an aristocratic French home in New Orleans, Louisiana, Beauregard graduated from West Point and served in the Mexican War (1846–1848) before becoming the Confederacy's first brigadier general and later a full general. He commanded Confederate and South Carolina troops at Charleston Harbor in April 1861, forcing the surrender of Fort Sumter, and, with Joseph E. Johnston, routed Irvin McDowell at Manassas in July. Beauregard's Napoleonic pretensions did not suit the temperament of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, however, and the two quarreled for much of the war and postwar. Beauregard fought well at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, but left his army without leave for the summer and was transferred east. He was critical in the defense of Petersburg in 1864, but ended the war largely out of favor. After the war, he engaged in politics that were sympathetic to the civil rights of African Americans, criticized Davis and Johnston in a two-volume, ghostwritten memoir, and accumulated wealth that was unusual for a former Confederate commander. Beauregard died in New Orleans in 1893.
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:49:06 EST]]> /Libby_Prison Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:24:53 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Libby_Prison Libby Prison, in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, housed Union prisoners of war during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Beginning as a hospital and general prison in 1861, Libby was converted into an officers-only facility in 1862, while also serving as a processing center for all Union prisoners. (Union enlisted men were often routed to Belle Isle on the James River.) The officers who stayed at Libby were crowded inside a three-story former tobacco factory in sparsely furnished rooms that exposed them to the elements; they often also suffered from severe food shortages. Their guards, in turn, struggled with controlling a large prison population. In February 1864, 109 prisoners escaped by tunnel, with 59 eventually reaching Union lines. A few weeks later, Union cavalry general H. Judson Kilpatrick and his one-legged protégé Colonel Ulric Dahlgren mounted an ambitious but disastrous rescue attempt, prompting Libby officials to dig a mine, fill it with explosives, and threaten to destroy the facility if any prisoners attempted to escape. Shortly thereafter, Confederate officials began transferring Libby's population to Georgia, with the facility being used as a place of temporary confinement for the next year. After Richmond fell on April 2, 1865, former Confederate officials became Libby's newest inmates.
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:24:53 EST]]> /Ashby_Turner_1828-1862 Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:19:16 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ashby_Turner_1828-1862 Turner Ashby was a Confederate cavalry general who served under Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862 during the American Civil War (1861–1865). An expert horseman whose dead mounts were kept as romantic relics, Ashby was arguably the Confederacy's most renowned combat hero before his death in 1862. His competency for high command and potential for growth are still debated among military historians, but it's clear that his presence in the Shenandoah Valley was a powerful catalyst to the Confederate military effort there during the war's first year. Indeed, his presence resonates even now, as many Shenandoah localities celebrate Confederate Memorial Day on June 6, the day of his death.
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:19:16 EST]]> /Stuart_J_E_B_1833-1864 Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:06:15 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Stuart_J_E_B_1833-1864 J. E. B. Stuart, popularly known by his nickname "Jeb," was the chief of cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). A Regular Army veteran who participated in the capture of John Brown at Harpers Ferry in 1859, Stuart fought well at the First Battle of Manassas (1861) but became a Confederate hero the following summer when he led 1,200 troopers in a famous ride around Union general George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac. In particular, he was praised for his ability to gather intelligence and act as Robert E. Lee's "eyes and ears," leading a second long ride later that year. At Chancellorsville (1863), Stuart temporarily led Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's corps when both Jackson and A. P. Hill were wounded, and helped to push Joseph Hooker's forces back across the Rappahannock River. Stuart cultivated himself as the epitome of Virginia's mythical Cavalier, sporting a long beard and a plumed hat. He enjoyed staging elaborate reviews like the two near Brandy Station, Virginia, in June 1863, which attracted many local women. The day after the second review, Stuart's troopers fended off a surprise attack in the largest cavalry battle of the war, but soon after, another long ride around the Union army failed, hampering Lee's intelligence at the Battle of Gettysburg (1863). Stuart was wounded at the Battle of Yellow Tavern and died one day later on May 12, 1864.
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:06:15 EST]]> /Brown_John_1800-1859 Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:13:55 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Brown_John_1800-1859 John Brown was a fervent abolitionist who was accused of massacring pro-slavery settlers in Kansas in 1856 and who, in 1859, led an unsuccessful raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (in what is now West Virginia), in an attempt to start a slave insurrection. On October 16, 1859, Brown and his men occupied the federal arsenal in the northern Shenandoah Valley and were quickly surrounded by the combined forces of local militias and a detachment of United States marines led by Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart. After a thirty-six-hour shoot-out, Brown and his surviving men surrendered. At the insistence of Virginia governor Henry Wise, Brown was tried in state, not federal, court. At the end of a gripping trial held in Charles Town, he was found guilty of conspiracy, of inciting servile insurrection, and of treason against the state. He was hanged on December 2, 1859. Brown's raid (and the fact that five of his "soldiers" were African Americans) touched off a frenzy among Southern slave-owners and, in the estimation of many historians, set the nation on an irreversible course toward the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:13:55 EST]]> /Confederate_Battle_Flag Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:32:19 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Confederate_Battle_Flag The Confederate battle flag, initially authorized for units of the Confederate armed forces during the American Civil War (1861–1865), has become one of the most recognized, misunderstood, and controversial symbols in American history. Originally designed as a Confederate national flag by William Porcher Miles of South Carolina, it was rejected by the Confederate Congress but subsequently adopted by the Confederate army, which needed a banner that was easily distinguishable from the United States flag. The battle flag transformed into a national symbol as the Army of Northern Virginia, with which it was closely associated, also became an important symbol. It even was incorporated into the Confederacy's Second and Third National flags. Following the war, proponents of the Lost Cause used the battle flag to represent Southern valor and honor, although it also was implicitly connected to white supremacy. In the mid-twentieth century, the battle flag simultaneously became ubiquitous in American culture while, partly through the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan, becoming increasingly tied to racial violence and intimidation. African Americans conflated the battle flag to opposition to the civil rights movement, while neo-Confederates argued that its meaning had to do with states' rights and southern identity, not racial hatred. The political and social lines of dispute over the flag remain much the same at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Wed, 21 Jul 2010 11:32:19 EST]]> /Civil_War_in_Virginia_The_American Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:53:41 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Civil_War_in_Virginia_The_American The American Civil War was fought from 1861 until 1865. It began after Virginia and ten other states in the southern United States seceded from the Union following the election of Abraham Lincoln as U.S. president in 1860. Worried that Lincoln would interfere with slavery and citing states' rights as a justification, Southern leaders established the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as its president and Richmond as its capital. After Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the war moved to Virginia. Union forces made several failed attempts to capture Richmond, and Confederate general Robert E. Lee twice invaded the North, only to be defeated in battle. Most, but not all, Virginians supported the Confederacy. In 1863, Unionists in the western part of the state established West Virginia. On the home front, both white and African American families suffered food shortages or were forced to flee their homes. The Confederate government instituted a draft, or conscription law, and in some cases impressed, or confiscated, private property. By the time Lee surrendered in 1865, much of the state had been ravaged by war. But the end of fighting also meant emancipation, or freedom, for enslaved African Americans. In the years that followed, many white Virginians saw their fight for independence as the Lost Cause, while black Virginians struggled to overcome institutionalized white supremacy and earn full citizenship rights.
Tue, 20 Jul 2010 13:53:41 EST]]> /Pierpont_Francis_H_1814-1899 Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:45:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pierpont_Francis_H_1814-1899 Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:45:28 EST]]> /Jackson_Thomas_J_Stonewall_1824-1863 Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:16:10 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Jackson_Thomas_J_Stonewall_1824-1863 Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson was a West Point graduate, veteran of the Mexican War (1846–1848), instructor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, and Confederate general under Robert E. Lee during the American Civil War (1861–1865). One of Lee's ablest commanders, Jackson earned his famous nickname during the First Battle of Manassas in 1861 when a fellow general is said to have cried out, "There is Jackson standing like a stone wall! Rally behind the Virginians!" A few contemporary accounts suggest that the stone-wall comparison was not intended to be complimentary, but it hardly matters. The real Jackson—peculiarly earnest and single-minded but in many ways not so different from other soldiers of his day—was being transformed into the mythological one, an Old Testament God of wrath contrasting with Lee's Christ-like figure. When Jackson was accidentally wounded by his own men during the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863), Lee relayed to him a message: "Give General Jackson my affectionate regards, and say to him: he has lost his left arm but I my right." Jackson died eight days later due to complications from the injury. A martyr to his cause during the war, Jackson has become an iconic figure in Southern culture, second only to Lee in the pantheon of Confederate heroes.
Fri, 09 Jul 2010 15:16:10 EST]]> /Byrd_Harry_Flood_1887-1966 Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:35:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Byrd_Harry_Flood_1887-1966 Harry F. Byrd served as a Virginia state senator (1915–1925), governor (1926–1930), and United States senator (1933–1965), was the father of a U.S. senator, and for forty years led the Democratic political machine known as the Byrd Organization. By virtue of both his service and power, he was one of the most prominent Virginians of the twentieth century. But much of that power was wielded in mostly vain opposition to the New Deal's big-government programs and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. As governor he instituted a popular downsizing of state government that increased efficiency, but the end of his career was marked by his now-infamous "massive resistance" to federally mandated school desegregation.
Fri, 09 Jul 2010 12:35:28 EST]]> /Lost_Cause_The Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:50:50 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Lost_Cause_The The Lost Cause is an interpretation of the American Civil War (1861–1865) that seeks to present the war, from the perspective of Confederates, in the best possible terms. Developed by white Southerners, many of them former Confederate generals, in a postwar climate of economic, racial, and gender uncertainty, the Lost Cause created and romanticized the "Old South" and the Confederate war effort, often distorting history in the process. For this reason, many historians have labeled the Lost Cause a myth or a legend. It is certainly an important example of public memory, one in which nostalgia for the Confederate past is accompanied by a collective forgetting of the horrors of slavery. Providing a sense of relief to white Southerners who feared being dishonored by defeat, the Lost Cause was largely accepted in the years following the war by white Americans who found it to be a useful tool in reconciling North and South. The Lost Cause has lost much of its academic support but continues to be an important part of how the Civil War is commemorated in the South and remembered in American popular culture.
Thu, 01 Jul 2010 16:50:50 EST]]> /Johnston_Joseph_E_1807-1891 Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:32:04 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Johnston_Joseph_E_1807-1891 Joseph E. Johnston was a veteran of the Mexican War (1846–1848), quartermaster general of the United States Army, a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865), a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1879–1881), and a U.S. railroad commissioner in the first administration of U.S. president Grover Cleveland (1885–1889). The highest-ranking U.S. Army officer to resign his commission at the start of the Civil War, Johnston helped lead Confederates to victory at the First Battle of Manassas in July 1861; a month later, however, when Confederate president Jefferson Davis appointed five men to the rank of full general, he was only fourth on the list, igniting a bitter feud with the president that would last the war and even spill into his postwar memoir, Narrative of Military Operations (1874). Historians, meanwhile, have split on his military performance, with some dubbing him "Retreatin' Joe," citing, among others, his retreats in the face of General George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac on the Peninsula in 1862. Johnston was wounded on June 1, 1862, at the Battle of Seven Pines, and Davis turned the Army of Northern Virginia over to General Robert E. Lee, who led it for the remainder of the war. Other historians have argued that Johnston's strategy of withdrawal saved Confederates from destruction during the Atlanta Campaign (1864); nevertheless, Davis replaced him then, too.
Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:32:04 EST]]> /Desertion_Confederate_During_the_Civil_War Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:01:40 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Desertion_Confederate_During_the_Civil_War Desertion occurs when soldiers deliberately and permanently leave military service before their term of service has expired. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), both the Union and Confederate armies were plagued by deserters, whose absence depleted the strength of their respective forces. Historians traditionally have distinguished between "stragglers"—those soldiers who leave with the intention of returning—and deserters, who are absent without leave, or AWOL, for thirty days or more. The reasons soldiers left, meanwhile, included poor equipment, food, and leadership. Some acts of desertion have also been described as a form of political protest. Confederate Virginians fled military service at a rate of between 10 and 15 percent, more or less comparable to the desertion rate among Union troops, which stood between 9 and 12 percent. Prior to mid-1862, desertion was lightly punished if at all, but following the Confederate Conscription Act of April 1862, enforcement was often harsh and included execution.
Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:01:40 EST]]> /Military_Executions_During_the_Civil_War Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:55:29 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Military_Executions_During_the_Civil_War More soldiers were executed during the American Civil War (1861–1865) than in all other American wars combined. Approximately 500 men, representing both North and South, were shot or hanged during the four-year conflict, two-thirds of them for desertion. The Confederate Articles of War (1861) specified that "all officers and soldiers who have received pay, or have been duly enlisted in the services of the Confederate States, and shall be convicted of having deserted the same, shall suffer death, or such other punishment as, by sentence of a court-martial, shall be inflicted." The General Orders of the War Department (1861, 1862, 1863) directed that those men convicted of desertion were "to be shot to death with musketry, at such time and place as the commanding General may direct."
Thu, 01 Jul 2010 14:55:29 EST]]> /Virginia_State_Capitol_During_the_Civil_War_The Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:10:46 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_State_Capitol_During_the_Civil_War_The Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:10:46 EST]]> /Seven_Days_Battles Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:01:27 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Seven_Days_Battles Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:01:27 EST]]> /New_Market_Battle_of Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:11:09 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/New_Market_Battle_of Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:11:09 EST]]> /Manassas_First_Battle_of Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:09:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Manassas_First_Battle_of Thu, 17 Jun 2010 15:09:00 EST]]> /Lee_Mary_Anna_Randolph_Custis_1807-1873 Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:01:27 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Lee_Mary_Anna_Randolph_Custis_1807-1873 Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:01:27 EST]]> /Spotsylvania_Court_House_Battle_of Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:43:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Spotsylvania_Court_House_Battle_of Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:43:03 EST]]> /Randolph_George_Wythe_1818-1867 Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:54:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Randolph_George_Wythe_1818-1867 George Wythe Randolph was a lawyer, Confederate general, and, briefly, Confederate secretary of war during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The grandson of former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson, Randolph hailed from an elite Virginia family but largely shunned public life until John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. He supported secession, founded the Richmond Howitzers, joined the Confederate army, and fought at the Battle of Big Bethel (1861). Appointed the Confederacy's third secretary of war in March 1862, he helped to reform the War Department at a time when the Confederate capital at Richmond was threatened by Union general George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign (1862). Randolph helped to improve procurement and authored the Confederacy's first conscription law, having already done the same for Virginia. His independence and focus on the strategic importance of the West put him into conflict with Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and he resigned in November 1862, his health failing. He died of tuberculosis in 1867.
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:54:14 EST]]> /Lexington_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:47:24 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Lexington_During_the_Civil_War The town of Lexington is the seat of Rockbridge County in the Shenandoah Valley. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), it was home to Washington College (now Washington and Lee University) and the Virginia Military Institute. Although not of great strategic importance, the town nevertheless smoldered in the atmosphere of war long before many other Virginian communities felt the conflict. In November 1859, a detachment of its resident corps of cadets from the Virginia Military Institute was deployed to Charles Town (in what is now West Virginia) to provide security at the execution of the infamous John Brown for his raid on Harpers Ferry. Unionist sentiments prevailed, however, until U.S. president Abraham Lincoln's call for troops, when many of Lexington's male citizens enlisted in service of the Confederate States of America. Events such as the burial of Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and Union general David Hunter's fiery raid brought the quiet mountain town momentary attention from the wider world, but the demands of the Civil War also siphoned its resources on a daily basis.
Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:47:24 EST]]> /Danville_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:02:27 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Danville_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 16 Jun 2010 12:02:27 EST]]> /Newton_John_1822-1895 Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:55:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Newton_John_1822-1895 Wed, 16 Jun 2010 11:55:35 EST]]> /Virginia_Soldiers_Confederate_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:53:39 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_Soldiers_Confederate_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:53:39 EST]]> /Drummond_William_d_1677 Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:46:54 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Drummond_William_d_1677 Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:46:54 EST]]> /Baldwin_John_Brown_1820-1873 Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:34:15 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Baldwin_John_Brown_1820-1873 John Brown Baldwin was an attorney, member of the Virginia Convention of 1861, member of the Confederate House of Representatives (1861–1865), and Speaker of the House of Delegates (1865–1867). After attending the University of Virginia, Baldwin studied law in his native Staunton and became politically active on behalf of his law partner and brother-in-law Alexander H. H. Stuart, a Whig Party candidate for presidential elector in 1844. Baldwin served a term in the House of Delegates and, during the secession crisis of 1860–1861, was a staunch Unionist who, as a delegate to the secession convention, voted against leaving the Union, even meeting privately with U.S. president Abraham Lincoln in an attempt to find a compromise. After a brief stint in the Confederate army at the beginning of the American Civil War (1861–1865), he served in the Confederate Congress. After the war, he was a Conservative Party leader and, as Speaker of the House of Delegates, became such an expert on parliamentary law that the rules of the House became known as Baldwin's Rules. He was a moderate who supported limits on the rights of African Americans and, in 1869, as a member of the so-called Committee of Nine, met with U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant to negotiate the end of Reconstruction in Virginia. He died in 1873.
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:34:15 EST]]> /Jackson_Giles_B_1853-1924 Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:05:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Jackson_Giles_B_1853-1924 Giles B. Jackson, although born enslaved, became an attorney, entrepreneur, real estate developer, newspaper publisher, and civil rights activist in the conservative mold of his mentor, Booker T. Washington. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), he served as a body servant to his master, a Confederate cavalry colonel. After the war, Jackson worked for the Stewart family in Richmond, where he learned to read and write. Subsequently, he was employed in the law offices of William H. Beveridge, who tutored Jackson in the law. In 1887, Jackson became the first African American attorney certified to argue before the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. The next year, he helped found a bank associated with the United Order of True Reformers, and in 1900 became an aide to Washington, who had just founded the National Negro Business League in Boston. Jackson organized and promoted the Jamestown Negro Exhibit at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition of 1907 in the face of criticism from some black intellectuals that his attempt to highlight black achievement was itself an accommodation of Jim Crow segregation. He published a newspaper designed to publicize the exhibition and, in 1908, a book detailing its history. His efforts at the end of his life on behalf of a congressional bill aimed at addressing interracial labor problems failed. Jackson died in 1924.
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 16:05:28 EST]]> /Benga_Ota_ca_1883-1916 Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:58:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Benga_Ota_ca_1883-1916 Ota Benga was a Pygmy from the Congo who traveled to the United States several times as an adult before finally settling in Lynchburg, Virginia. After his wife and two children were killed and he was sold into slavery, Benga's freedom was purchased by the Presbyterian missionary Samuel P. Verner. The two became friends, and Benga is believed to be the first African Pygmy to reside permanently in the United States. After appearing at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, Benga spent three weeks exhibited in a cage with apes at the Bronx Zoo in New York City, upsetting Benga and causing a public outcry. He spent three years in a Brooklyn, New York, orphanage before relocating to Lynchburg to attend the Virginia Theological Seminary and College. In Lynchburg, he befriended the seminary's president, his wife, and their kids, as well as the poet Anne Spencer. Benga's attempts at assimilation ultimately failed, however, and he committed suicide on March 20, 1916. He was nearly forgotten until 1992, when the publication of a definitive biography brought him international attention and renewed popularity. For many, Benga personifies the shameful exploitation of African people by European colonial powers, as well as the historical use of science and anthropology to support racism and ethnocentrism.
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:58:00 EST]]> /Ashe_Arthur_1943-1993 Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:48:37 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ashe_Arthur_1943-1993 Arthur Ashe was a professional tennis player, broadcaster, author, and activist. Known for his on-court grace and low-key demeanor, he was the first black men's tennis champion at the U.S. Open and Wimbledon, the first African American to play for and captain the U.S. Davis Cup team, and the first black man inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. Yet it was and remains Ashe's accomplishments outside of professional tennis for which he is most noted. He was the first and only African American to have a statue of his likeness erected on Richmond's historic Monument Avenue and one of the most prominent athletes of any race to die from AIDS.
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:48:37 EST]]> /Minnigerode_Charles_1814-1894 Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:34:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Minnigerode_Charles_1814-1894 Charles Minnigerode was a professor of Latin and Greek and, for thirty-three years, the rector of Saint Paul's Episcopal Church in Richmond. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Saint Paul's was sometimes called "the Cathedral of the Confederacy," and its parishioners included Confederate president Jefferson Davis and Confederate general Robert E. Lee. In 1862, Minnigerode, who immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1839, baptized Davis, and in 1864, he read prayers at the burial of Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart.
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 15:34:00 EST]]> /Medicine_in_Virginia_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:59:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Medicine_in_Virginia_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:59:00 EST]]> /Danville_Civil_Rights_Demonstrations_of_1963 Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:24:29 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Danville_Civil_Rights_Demonstrations_of_1963 The Danville civil rights demonstrations began peacefully late in May 1963 when local civil rights leaders organized demonstrations, sit-ins, and marches to protest segregation in all spheres, but especially in municipal government, employment, and public facilities. As protests accelerated, however, white authorities responded early in June with tough legal stratagems and violence, attacking demonstrators with clubs and fire hoses. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) all sent state and national leaders to Danville to assist the African American protesters, but to little avail. The legal resistance displayed by authorities—injunctions, ordinances, and court procedures condemned by the U.S. Justice Department—proved so effective and unyielding that protests were stymied, resulting in few immediate gains for African Americans.
Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:24:29 EST]]> /Ann_fl_1706-1712 Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:00:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ann_fl_1706-1712 Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:00:17 EST]]> /Amherst_Sir_Jeffery_1717-1797 Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:54:07 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Amherst_Sir_Jeffery_1717-1797 Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:54:07 EST]]> /Pickett_s_Charge Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:29:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pickett_s_Charge Pickett's Charge was the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), and one of the most famous infantry attacks of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Lasting about an hour on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, it pitted 12,000 Confederates—including three brigades of Virginians under George E. Pickett—against half that number of Union troops. On July 2, Robert E. Lee had unsuccessfully attacked the Union flanks; in what even some of his own men perceived as a desperate gambit, he now attacked the center, asking his troops to cross an open field nearly three-quarters of a mile long. They were bloodily repulsed, losing half their number. Controversy resulted, as Confederate veterans struggled to lay claim to honor and glory, pitting Virginians against North Carolinians in efforts to explain why the attack had failed. Many Southerners came to believe the charge represented the "High Water Mark" of Confederate hopes for independence, a view cultivated by proponents of the Lost Cause interpretation of the Civil War. Meanwhile, twentieth-century popular culture transformed Pickett into a soldier as "gallant and graceful as a knight of chivalry riding to a tournament," in the words of his wife, LaSalle Corbell Pickett. And films like Gettysburg (1993) glorified the attack even while historians continued to debate Lee's decision, sometimes comparing it to Union general Ulysses S. Grant's equally futile attacks at Cold Harbor in Hanover County in 1864.
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:29:35 EST]]> /Ashuaquid_fl_1607 Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:26:13 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ashuaquid_fl_1607 Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:26:13 EST]]> /Van_Lew_Elizabeth_L_1818-1900 Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:37:40 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Van_Lew_Elizabeth_L_1818-1900 Elizabeth Van Lew was a Richmond Unionist and abolitionist who spied for the United States government during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Leading a network of a dozen or so white and African American women and men, she relayed information on Confederate operations to Union generals and assisted in the care and sometimes escape of Union prisoners of war being held in the Confederate capital. Van Lew, who worked with invisible ink and coded messages, has been called "the most skilled, innovative, and successful" of all Civil War–era spies. While some historians have claimed that she was open about her Unionist politics, deflecting suspicion by behaving as if she were mentally ill, others have argued that these "Crazy Bet" stories are a myth. After the war, Van Lew served as postmaster of Richmond during the administration of U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, one of the generals to whom she had once fed information.
Tue, 08 Jun 2010 11:37:40 EST]]> /Fort_Monroe_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:22:48 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Fort_Monroe_During_the_Civil_War Fort Monroe is a military installation located in Hampton Roads, Virginia, on the Peninsula overlooking the Chesapeake Bay. It was the only federal military installation in the Upper South to remain under United States control throughout the American Civil War (1861–1865). Early in the war, the fort became an outpost of freedom within the Confederacy when Union commanders used it to house refugee slaves. The fort also headquartered the Union Department of Virginia and North Carolina, and several significant military campaigns and combined operations were launched from the installation. Most notably, it served as the staging area for Union major general George B. McClellan's ill-fated Peninsula Campaign of 1862. After the war, the fort served as a destination for another brand of fugitive. Following his capture in May 1865 until his bail bond was accepted two years later, Confederate president Jefferson Davis was imprisoned at Fort Monroe.
Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:22:48 EST]]> /Browne_William_Washington_1849-1897 Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:24:40 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Browne_William_Washington_1849-1897 Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:24:40 EST]]> /Civil_Liberties_in_Virginia_during_the_Civil_War Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:04:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Civil_Liberties_in_Virginia_during_the_Civil_War Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:04:21 EST]]> /Poe_Edgar_Allan_1809-1849 Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:41:53 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Poe_Edgar_Allan_1809-1849 Edgar Allan Poe was a poet, short story writer, editor, and critic. Credited by many scholars as the inventor of the detective genre in fiction, he was a master at using elements of mystery, psychological terror, and the macabre in his writing. His most famous poem, "The Raven" (1845), combines his penchant for suspense with some of the most famous lines in American poetry. While editor of the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger, Poe carved out a philosophy of poetry that emphasized brevity and beauty for its own sake. Stories, he wrote, should be crafted to convey a single, unified impression, and for Poe, that impression was most often dread. "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), for instance, memorably describes the paranoia of its narrator, who is guilty of murder. After leaving Richmond, Poe lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York, seeming to collect literary enemies wherever he went. Incensed by his especially sharp, often sarcastic style of criticism, they were not inclined to help Poe as his life unraveled because of sickness and poverty. After Poe's death at the age of forty, a former colleague, Rufus W. Griswold, wrote a scathing biography that contributed, in the years to come, to a literary caricature. Poe's poetry and prose, however, have endured.
Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:41:53 EST]]> /Ladies_Memorial_Associations Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:37:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ladies_Memorial_Associations Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:37:17 EST]]> /United_Daughters_of_the_Confederacy Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:31:24 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/United_Daughters_of_the_Confederacy Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:31:24 EST]]> /Argall_Samuel_bap_1580-1626 Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:12:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Argall_Samuel_bap_1580-1626 Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:12:56 EST]]> /Centreville_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:07:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Centreville_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 02 Jun 2010 14:07:03 EST]]> /Chalmers_Anna_Maria_Mead_1809-1891 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:36:40 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chalmers_Anna_Maria_Mead_1809-1891 Anna Maria Mead Chalmers was a writer and educator. She authored numerous children's books in the 1830s, later wrote short works of fiction and devotion, and contributed to the Boston Home Journal, the New York Churchman, the New York Tribune, and the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1841, she opened a Richmond boarding and day school for girls, called Mrs. Mead's School, and served as principal for twelve years. The rigorous curriculum was comparable to the best available education for boys in Virginia. Chalmers was married three times, and she outlived all three husbands and three out of four of her children. She settled in Halifax County with her third husband in 1856, and there she raised money and taught at Sunday schools for freedpeople that she established. In addition, in 1877 she formed the Southern Churchman Cot fund to support beds for poor children at Retreat for the Sick, a Richmond hospital. She died in Albemarle County in 1891.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:36:40 EST]]> /Tyler_Lyon_Gardiner_1853-1935 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:34:25 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Tyler_Lyon_Gardiner_1853-1935 Lyon Gardiner Tyler, son of U.S. president John Tyler, was a historian and genealogist well known for his defense of southern causes. His presidency of the College of William and Mary ranks as a watershed in the school's history. Born in Charles City County and educated at the University of Virginia, Tyler practiced law in Richmond and served as principal of a private school in Memphis, Tennessee, before procuring funds for the reopening of the Civil War–damaged College of William and Mary and assuming its leadership. During his presidency, he opened the college to women, established it as a state-funded institution, and founded the William and Mary Quarterly, now a highly respected history journal. During his lifetime, he published a number of works documenting his family's history, supporting his father's administration, and promoting new interpretations of Virginia history during the Federal period, which highlighted the importance of the Tidewater region.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:34:25 EST]]> /Disfranchisement Fri, 28 May 2010 15:33:08 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Disfranchisement Fri, 28 May 2010 15:33:08 EST]]> /Wise_Henry_A_1806-1876 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:31:23 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Wise_Henry_A_1806-1876 Henry A. Wise was a lawyer, a member of the United States House of Representatives (1832–1844), U.S. minister to Brazil (1844–1847), governor of Virginia (1856–1860) during John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, and a brigadier general in the Confederate army during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Born in Accomack County on Virginia's Eastern Shore, Wise rose to national prominence during the political turmoil of the late antebellum period. A fiery politician and gifted orator with a mercurial temperament, he advocated a number of progressive positions, including capital improvements in western Virginia, broadening Virginia's electoral base through constitutional reform, and public funding for universal elementary education. Wise also was a stout defender of slavery and eventually became an ardent secessionist. Perhaps best known for being governor when Brown attempted to spark a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Wise had the authority to commute Brown's death sentence. Instead, he allowed the execution to take place, making possible the radical abolitionist's ascension to martyrdom. After Virginia's secession in 1861, Wise served in the Confederate army. In 1872, he supported U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, the former Union general-in-chief, in his campaign for reelection.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:31:23 EST]]> /Whig_Party_in_Virginia Fri, 28 May 2010 15:30:22 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Whig_Party_in_Virginia Fri, 28 May 2010 15:30:22 EST]]> /Virginia_Military_Institute_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 15:29:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_Military_Institute_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 15:29:28 EST]]> /United_States_Presidential_Election_of_1860 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:26:36 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/United_States_Presidential_Election_of_1860 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:26:36 EST]]> /Thomas_George_H_1816-1870 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:25:23 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Thomas_George_H_1816-1870 George H. Thomas was a Virginia native, a veteran of the Mexican War (1846–1848), and a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865) who earned the nickname "the Rock of Chickamauga" after his defensive stand at the Georgia battle in 1863. He won an early Union victory at the Battle of Mill Springs, Kentucky (1862), and decisively defeated the Confederate Army of Tennessee during the Battle of Nashville (1864). He also served as a subordinate at the Battle of Stone's River (1862–1863) and the Chattanooga Campaign (1863) in Tennessee and, under his West Point roommate William T. Sherman, the 1864 Atlanta Campaign. Thomas was a slave owner before the war, but his experience commanding African American soldiers led him to change his views, and he became a staunch defender of civil rights during Reconstruction (1865–1876). As senior military commander in Kentucky and Tennessee from 1865 until 1869, he fought to protect African Americans from the Ku Klux Klan and other white-supremacist groups. He died of a stroke in 1870.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:25:23 EST]]> /Terrill_William_R_1834-1862 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:23:09 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Terrill_William_R_1834-1862 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:23:09 EST]]> /Constitutional_Convention_Virginia_1901-1902 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:22:12 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Constitutional_Convention_Virginia_1901-1902 The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901–1902 produced the Virginia Constitution of 1902 and is an important example of post-Reconstruction efforts to restore white supremacy in the American South by disenfranchising large numbers of blacks and working-class whites. Remaining in effect until July 1, 1971, the constitution did much to shape Virginia politics in the twentieth century—a politics dominated by a conservative Democratic Party that fiercely resisted the New Deal, the New Frontier, the Great Society, the civil rights movement, and, with special fervor, federally mandated public school desegregation. Yet the significance of the 1901–1902 convention extends beyond Virginia in that it demonstrates the irony of how Progressive Era reforms nationwide often resulted in state legislation that was far from progressive.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:22:12 EST]]> /Green_Julien_1900-1998 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:19:34 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Green_Julien_1900-1998 Julien Green (born Julian Hartridge Green) was an author best known for his novels, plays, essays, and a multi-volume journal that he wrote from 1928 to 1996. In 1971 he became the first non-French national to be accepted as a member of the prestigious Académie Française, the self-described "guardians of the French language." Green attended the University of Virginia, where a small collection of his papers is now housed. Some of his writing, inspired by his experiences as a student there, dealt primarily with homosexuality, Catholicism, and the conflict between the desires of the body and the aspirations of the soul.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:19:34 EST]]> /Terrill_James_B_1838-1864 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:17:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Terrill_James_B_1838-1864 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:17:28 EST]]> /Pollard_John_Garland_1871-1937 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:13:26 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pollard_John_Garland_1871-1937 John Garland Pollard was a progressive Democrat who served as delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901–1902, attorney general of Virginia (1914–1918), and governor (1930–1934). Handpicked by Harry F. Byrd Sr. to be his gubernatorial successor, Pollard left a legacy as governor that was clouded by the fact that he took office on the eve of the Great Depression. While independent-minded, Pollard was never able to get fully out from under the thumb of Byrd (supposedly he would remark while patting his belly that he had become so rotund by "swallowing the Byrd machine"). Byrd's control over Pollard and Virginia's political environment was particularly evident in the initiative to legalize alcohol when Byrd went around Pollard to senator William M. Tuck to gather the General Assembly together in order to push through a state referendum to repeal Prohibition and establish the state-run Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. Outside of politics, Pollard was an educator and member of several public and philanthropic commissions and organizations. As a practicing attorney, he wrote Pollard's Code of Virginia, which became an often-consulted reference work on the laws of Virginia. He also served briefly as a professor of constitutional law and history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. In 1936 Pollard helped to found the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, the first state art museum in the United States, and served as president of the museum's board of directors.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:13:26 EST]]> /Page_Thomas_Nelson_1853-1922 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:12:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Page_Thomas_Nelson_1853-1922 Thomas Nelson Page was the most prominent writer among several southern local colorists whose poems, stories, and novels idealized the Old South and served as a kind of imaginative precursor to Margaret Mitchell's epic novel Gone with the Wind (1936). In fact, few writers have so lauded Virginia's plantation class as Page, or had so great an impact on the ideology of both Virginia and the American South during the Reconstruction period (1865–1877) that followed the American Civil War (1861–1865). In the context of the great social upheaval following that war, stories like Page's hugely influential "Marse Chan" (1884) promoted the image of an Old South replete with gracious aristocrats and loyal servants and a New South fraught with turmoil but ready for reconciliation with the North. This nostalgic, revisionist version of history was embraced with gusto by both northern and southern readers, and its vestiges remain even today in popular concepts of the South.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:12:06 EST]]> /States_Rights Fri, 28 May 2010 15:05:31 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/States_Rights Fri, 28 May 2010 15:05:31 EST]]> /Scott_Winfield_1786-1866 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:04:18 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Scott_Winfield_1786-1866 Winfield Scott was a hero of the Mexican War (1846–1848), the last Whig Party candidate for U.S. president, and commanding general of the United States Army at the start of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Known as "Old Fuss and Feathers" for his equal love of discipline and pomp, Scott by 1861 had served in the military for more than fifty years and under fourteen U.S. presidents. He had been severely wounded in battle, avoided several wars with his diplomatic skills, and commanded the army that conquered Mexico City in 1847, all of which made him the most admired and famous soldier in America. Less well known is the fact that Scott was convicted by court-martial for conduct unbecoming an officer, was investigated by a court of inquiry, once was accused of treason, and several times offered his resignation from the army. When the Civil War began, the Dinwiddie County native remained loyal to the Union, and while age had so reduced his once-towering frame that he could no longer even mount a horse, his ego and intellect were still intact. Scott's Anaconda Plan for winning the war proved to be prescient but politically out of step, and he eventually lost control of the army to George B. McClellan. He soon retired, published a two-volume memoir in 1864, and died in 1866.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:04:18 EST]]> /Ruffin_Edmund_1794-1865 Fri, 28 May 2010 15:02:01 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ruffin_Edmund_1794-1865 Edmund Ruffin was a prominent Southern nationalist, noted agriculturalist, writer and essayist, and Virginia state senator (1823–1827). After dropping out of college and serving briefly in the Virginia militia during the War of 1812, Ruffin began a long career farming along the James River and studying the soil. He published the results of his experiments and founded a journal, the Farmers' Register, in 1833. During these years, Ruffin's politics also became radicalized, first around banking issues, and then around states' rights, slavery, and secession. After John Brown's failed raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859, Ruffin began speaking out against what he considered to be Northern aggression, and he even joined cadets from the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington so he could attend Brown's execution. Ruffin continued to agitate for secession during the United States presidential election of 1860, and he is erroneously credited with firing the first shot on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, starting the American Civil War (1861–1865). A popular hero in the South, Ruffin nevertheless suffered financial setbacks during the war, as well as declining health, and in 1865, following the Confederates' defeat, he killed himself.
Fri, 28 May 2010 15:02:01 EST]]> /Richmond_Fredericksburg_and_Potomac_Railroad_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 15:01:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Richmond_Fredericksburg_and_Potomac_Railroad_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 15:01:00 EST]]> /Crater_Battle_of_the Fri, 28 May 2010 14:57:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Crater_Battle_of_the The Battle of the Crater, part of the Petersburg Campaign, was the result of an unusual attempt, on the part of Union forces, to break through the Confederate defenses just south of the critical railroad hub of Petersburg, Virginia, during the American Civil War (1861–1865). For several weeks, Pennsylvania miners in Union general Ambrose E. Burnside's Ninth Corps worked at digging a long tunnel, packed the terminus with explosives, and then on the morning of July 30, 1864, blew it up. In the words of a Maine soldier, the sky was filled with "Earth, stones, timbers, arms, legs, guns unlimbered and bodies unlimbed." Burnside had initially planned to send a fresh division of black troops into the breach, but his superiors, Ulysses S. Grant and George G. Meade, ruled against it. That role—literally via a short straw—went to James H. Ledlie, a hard-drinking political general who spent the day well behind the lines as his white soldiers piled into the explosion's deep crater rather than go around it. Unable to escape, and followed by Burnside's other three divisions, they turned into what one New Hampshire soldier described as "a mass of worms crawling over each other"—easy targets for Confederates. The battle was a Union disaster and marked by particularly cruel treatment of the black troops who participated, many of whom were captured and murdered. Although Congress later blamed Meade for the loss, it was Ledlie and Burnside who lost their commands.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:57:28 EST]]> /Richmond_Howitzers Fri, 28 May 2010 14:53:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Richmond_Howitzers The Richmond Howitzers is a military unit formed in Richmond not long after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry late in 1859. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), three companies organized as the Richmond Howitzer Battalion and served in most of the campaigns of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The Howitzers reorganized in 1871 and saw active duty during both World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945). It is now a unit in the Virginia National Guard.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:53:17 EST]]> /Richmond_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 14:52:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Richmond_During_the_Civil_War Richmond, Virginia, was the capital of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War (1861–1865). It also served as the capital of Virginia, although when the city was about to fall to Union armies in April 1865, the governor and General Assembly moved their offices to Lynchburg for five days. Besides being the political home of the Confederacy, Richmond was a center of rail and industry, military hospitals, and prisoner-of-war camps and prisons, including Belle Isle and Libby Prison. It boasted a diversified economy that included grain milling and iron manufacturing, with the keystone of the local economy being the massive Tredegar ironworks. From the start of war, Confederate citizens flocked to the capital seeking safety and jobs, leading to periodic civil unrest, manifested most notably in the Bread Riot of April 1863. Because of its economic and political importance as well as its location near the United States capital, Richmond became the focus for most of the military campaigns in the war's Eastern Theater. In a sense, its success—especially in mobilizing, outfitting, and feeding the Confederate armies—predestined it to near-destruction in 1865. Just as ironic, that destruction was largely caused by Confederates, although images of the city's ruins have become iconic representations of the cost of war.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:52:00 EST]]> /Numbers_at_Pickett_s_Charge Fri, 28 May 2010 14:48:19 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Numbers_at_Pickett_s_Charge Pickett's Charge, which might be better understood either as Longstreet's assault or the Trimble-Pickett-Pettigrew Charge, was a failed Confederate frontal assault on July 3, 1863, on the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Although it is the most famous attack of the war, many of its basic facts remain unclear. "For a pivotal moment in military history replete with eyewitnesses," the historian Carol Reardon has written, "consensus on many aspects of the afternoon's events is surprisingly hard to reach." In particular, historians continue to disagree on the following: a) how many Confederate artillery pieces participated in the pre-attack bombardment, b) how long the artillery fired, c) how many Confederate troops participated in the attack, and d) how far they marched to reach the Union lines on Cemetery Ridge.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:48:19 EST]]> /Museum_of_the_Confederacy Fri, 28 May 2010 14:47:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Museum_of_the_Confederacy Fri, 28 May 2010 14:47:03 EST]]> /Military_Organization_and_Rank_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 14:44:38 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Military_Organization_and_Rank_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 14:44:38 EST]]> /McClellan_George_B_1826-1885 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:43:04 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/McClellan_George_B_1826-1885 George B. McClellan was a major general in the Union army during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Styled the "Young Napoleon" by the press, his battlefield successes and failures were eclipsed by controversies that arose between him and his superiors, especially U.S. president Abraham Lincoln. Following the Union debacle at the First Battle of Manassas in July 1861, McClellan formed and took command of the Army of the Potomac, expertly training it and earning the love and devotion of his men. He led the army first through the unsuccessful Peninsula Campaign and the Seven Days' Battles outside Richmond in 1862, and then through the climactic Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, which forced Confederate general Robert E. Lee to abandon his invasion of the North. Lincoln, however, was dissatisfied with McClellan's lack of aggression and relieved him of command. McClellan, a Democrat, responded by challenging the Republican president in the 1864 election. It was both the logical culmination of his advocacy for a limited-war strategy, and perhaps the clumsiest confirmation of his critics' accusations that his military caution was politically motivated. After McClellan lost his run for the presidency, he retired first to Europe and then to New Jersey, where he became governor.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:43:04 EST]]> /Manassas_Gap_Railroad_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 14:42:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Manassas_Gap_Railroad_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 14:42:03 EST]]> /Hill_A_P_1825-1865 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:37:39 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hill_A_P_1825-1865 A. P. Hill was a Confederate general in the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Behind Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and James Longstreet, "Little Powell," as he was sometimes called, was Robert E. Lee's most trusted lieutenant, best known for leading his Light Division in headlong charges but just as effective when making stubborn defensive stands. Though usually reserved and courteous, he also was notoriously short-tempered. An argument with Longstreet almost led to a duel, while a dispute with Jackson put Hill under arrest as his division entered Maryland in 1862. Still, he fought hard and well at Antietam (1862) and Chancellorsville (1863), and after Jackson's death he took over the army's new Third Corps. For the remainder of the war, Hill's generalship and administrative skills were sometimes lackluster, at other times inspired, and he was forced to miss parts of campaigns due to illness. Exactly a week before Lee's surrender at Appomattox, he was killed outside Petersburg.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:37:39 EST]]> /Gorgas_Josiah_1818-1883 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:34:01 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Gorgas_Josiah_1818-1883 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:34:01 EST]]> /Glendale_Battle_of Fri, 28 May 2010 14:32:51 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Glendale_Battle_of The Battle of Glendale, fought on June 30, 1862, was the second-to-last conflict during a series of engagements known as the Seven Days' Battles, which occurred at the tail end of the Peninsula Campaign during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Union major general George B. McClellan, charged with capturing the Confederate capital of Richmond, instead found himself in retreat from General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. While withdrawing back toward the James River, the Union army successfully stopped Lee's forces from overrunning its retreat, repulsing the Confederates outside the village of Glendale in eastern Henrico County, some eighteen miles east of Richmond. This resistance allowed McClellan to move his troops safely to a highly defensible position on Malvern Hill. The battle went McClellan's way in part because of intricate plans that were not well executed by Lee's lieutenants, in particular Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, who spent part of the day's fighting asleep under a tree.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:32:51 EST]]> /Garnett_Robert_S_1819-1861 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:31:05 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Garnett_Robert_S_1819-1861 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:31:05 EST]]> /Cooke_John_Esten_1830-1886 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:24:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cooke_John_Esten_1830-1886 John Esten Cooke was a novelist, biographer, and veteran of the American Civil War (1861–1865). One of the most important literary figures of nineteenth-century Virginia, Cooke was the prolific author of historical adventures and romances in the tradition of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. His most famous and perhaps best work, The Virginia Comedians: or, Old Days in the Old Dominion (1854), follows the aristocratic cad Champ Effingham in Virginia before the Revolutionary War (1775–1783). In fact, Cooke saw himself as a critic of aristocracy, but that criticism was rarely particularly sharp, and after the Civil War, his work unselfconsciously glorified the Confederacy in the tradition of the Lost Cause. "Come!" Cooke wrote in Surry of Eagle's-Nest (1866). "Perhaps as you follow me, you will live in the stormy days of a cavalier epoch: breathe its fiery atmosphere, and see its mighty forms as they defile before you, in a long and noble line." A relative by marriage to Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart, Cooke served with the cavalryman during the war and wrote hagiographic biographies of generals Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:24:06 EST]]> /Civil_War_Widows Fri, 28 May 2010 14:20:27 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Civil_War_Widows Fri, 28 May 2010 14:20:27 EST]]> /Carter_Robert_Randolph_1825-1888 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:19:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Carter_Robert_Randolph_1825-1888 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:19:14 EST]]> /Bagby_George_William_1828-1883 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:17:31 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bagby_George_William_1828-1883 George William Bagby was a licensed physician, editor, journalist, essayist, and humorist. He is best remembered as the editor who, on the advent of the American Civil War (1861–1865), turned the Southern Literary Messenger from a respected literary journal into a propagandistic tool that endorsed secession and the Confederate cause. After the war, Bagby attempted but failed to make a living as a humorist. As assistant to the secretary of the commonwealth—which, by law, also made him state librarian—Bagby wrote his most well-regarded essay, "The Old Virginia Gentleman" (1877). Many of his essays reflect his personal conflicts with Virginia and the South: at times he is objective, even critical; at others he is sentimental and celebrates the "old days" of a better (pre-Civil War) Virginia.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:17:31 EST]]> /Anderson_Joseph_Reid_1813-1892 Fri, 28 May 2010 14:15:53 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Anderson_Joseph_Reid_1813-1892 Joseph Reid Anderson was an iron manufacturer and Confederate army officer during the American Civil War (1861–1865). In 1848 he purchased the Tredegar Iron Company, the largest producer of munitions, cannon, railroad iron, steam engines, and other ordnance for the Confederate government during the Civil War. One of Anderson's most notable decisions was to introduce slaves into skilled industrial work at the ironworks, and by 1864, more than half the workers at Tredegar were bondsmen. Anderson served as a brigadier general for the Confederate army, and fought and was wounded during the Seven Days' Battles. He resigned his commission in the Confederate Army in 1862 to resume control of the ironworks, and after the war, Anderson was a strong proponent for peace, hoping to keep the Union army from taking possession of the ironworks. He failed, but regained control of Tredegar after he was pardoned by U.S. president Andrew Johnson in 1865. By 1873 Anderson had doubled the factory's prewar capacity, and its labor force exceeded 1,000 men, many of them black laborers and skilled workmen who received equal pay with white workers. Though Tredegar failed to make the transition from iron to steel production late in the nineteenth century, the company survived into the 1980s. Anderson was a well-known member of the Richmond community, serving multiple terms on the Richmond City Council and in the House of Delegates before and after the war.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:15:53 EST]]> /Anaconda_Plan Fri, 28 May 2010 14:13:25 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Anaconda_Plan The Anaconda Plan was the nickname attached to Lieutenant General Winfield Scott's comprehensive plan to defeat the Confederacy at the start of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Scott called for a strong defense of Washington, D.C., a blockade of the Confederacy's Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and a massive land and naval attack along the Mississippi River aimed at cutting the Confederacy in two. Although United States president Abraham Lincoln immediately instituted a naval blockade, he bowed to political pressure in 1861 and shelved the rest of the plan. In retrospect, Scott's strategy seems broadly prescient, although it aimed at political conciliation and did not anticipate the hard war fought in Virginia and elsewhere.
Fri, 28 May 2010 14:13:25 EST]]> /Hamner_Earl_Jr_1923- Fri, 28 May 2010 09:50:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hamner_Earl_Jr_1923- Earl Hamner Jr. is a writer of novels, television shows, and movies. Most notably, he created the popular semiautobiographical television series The Waltons (1972–1981), which was set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and based on his 1961 novel Spencer's Mountain and the 1963 film adaptation starring Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara. Hamner's own hardscrabble experiences growing up in a large family in depression-era Schuyler, Virginia, informed The Waltons, each episode of which famously ended with family members wishing one another goodnight.
Fri, 28 May 2010 09:50:14 EST]]> /Carlile_John_S_1817-1878 Fri, 28 May 2010 09:45:34 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Carlile_John_S_1817-1878 John S. Carlile was a member of the Convention of 1850–1851, the U.S. House of Representatives (1856–1858), the Convention of 1861, the First and Second Wheeling Conventions of 1861, and the United States Senate (1861–1865). As an active and outspoken participant in the Convention of 1850, he supported democratic reforms that invested western Virginia with more political power. In Congress, he supported the rights of slave owners, but as a delegate to the state convention during the secession crisis of 1861, he vehemently opposed leaving the Union, calling secession "a crime against God." The convention voted to secede anyway, and during the American Civil War (1861–1865), Carlile became a U.S. senator representing the Restored government of Virginia. In Washington, D.C., he helped shepherd the West Virginia statehood bill through Congress, only to vote against it in 1862, citing the bill's requirement that the new state adopt a plan of gradual emancipation. While Carlile remained in the Senate until 1865, he had so angered—and confused—his new West Virginia constituents that his political career was largely over. He died on his farm near Clarksburg in 1878.
Fri, 28 May 2010 09:45:34 EST]]> /Culpeper_County_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 09:44:04 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Culpeper_County_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 28 May 2010 09:44:04 EST]]> /Shepherdstown_Battle_of Fri, 28 May 2010 09:42:15 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Shepherdstown_Battle_of The Battle of Shepherdstown, fought on September 19 and 20, 1862, during the American Civil War (1861–1865), was the bloodiest battle in what would become West Virginia. Although often overlooked by historians because, as one Union soldier termed it, Shepherdstown "was not much of a battle as modern battles go," it had important consequences. First, it marked the end of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's first invasion of the North, which had been effectively repulsed at the Battle of Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, on September 17. In addition, the Battle of Shepherdstown, where Lee's army retreated back into Virginia, convinced Union general George B. McClellan that a second invasion was possible, paralyzing the Army of the Potomac in Maryland for the next month and allowing Lee's army time to regroup. Furthermore, it contributed to U.S. president Abraham Lincoln's decision to remove McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac.
Fri, 28 May 2010 09:42:15 EST]]> /Virginia_Convention_of_1861 Fri, 28 May 2010 09:40:02 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_Convention_of_1861 The Virginia Convention of 1861, also known later as the Secession Convention, convened on February 13, 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War (1861–1865), to consider whether Virginia should secede from the United States. Its 152 delegates, a majority of whom were Unionist, had been elected at the behest of the Virginia General Assembly, which also directed that their decision be ratified by a statewide referendum. Several states in the Deep South, beginning with South Carolina, had already left the Union in response to the election in November 1860 of Abraham Lincoln as United States president. Virginia, however, hesitated, and debate raged on for months. On April 4, secessionists badly lost a vote but prepared for the possibility of war nevertheless. Former Virginia governor Henry A. Wise worked behind the scenes and outside the legal process to secure the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry by military means, a move that prompted a furious objection from Unionist delegate John Baldwin of Staunton. After the fall of Fort Sumter on April 13 and Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers on April 15, the momentum turned toward secession, and the convention voted on April 17 to leave the Union. Virginians expressed their agreement at the polls on May 23. The state had joined the Confederacy.
Fri, 28 May 2010 09:40:02 EST]]> /Cockacoeske_d_by_July_1_1686 Thu, 27 May 2010 11:20:44 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cockacoeske_d_by_July_1_1686 Thu, 27 May 2010 11:20:44 EST]]> /Chauco_fl_1622-1623 Thu, 27 May 2010 11:18:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chauco_fl_1622-1623 Thu, 27 May 2010 11:18:14 EST]]> /Blaikley_Catherine_Kaidyee_ca_1695-1771 Thu, 27 May 2010 11:16:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Blaikley_Catherine_Kaidyee_ca_1695-1771 Thu, 27 May 2010 11:16:03 EST]]> /Cocke_Philip_St_George_1809-1861 Thu, 27 May 2010 10:11:05 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cocke_Philip_St_George_1809-1861 Philip St. George Cocke was a wealthy plantation owner in Powhatan County, Virginia and in Mississippi, who accumulated hundreds of slaves and thousands of acres of land. He became a leading advocate of agricultural interests, serving as president of the Virginia State Agricultural Society from 1853 to 1856, and promoting agricultural education. Cocke served as a lieutenant in the United States Army during the South Carolina Nullification Crisis in 1832, and in 1860, organized a cavalry troop in response to John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. When volunteers were combined into the Confederate army following the start of the American Civil War (1861–1865), Cocke's rank was reduced from brigadier general to colonel. He took offense and later complained bitterly when Confederate general Pierre G. T. Beauregard did not praise him enough for his conduct during the First Battle of Manassas (1861). In a state of despondency and mental anguish over what he regarded as poor treatment by General Robert E. Lee and others, he committed suicide on December 26, 1861.
Thu, 27 May 2010 10:11:05 EST]]> /Sigel_Franz_1824-1902 Wed, 26 May 2010 15:50:25 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Sigel_Franz_1824-1902 Franz Sigel was a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Born in Germany and a leader of the failed insurrections of 1848, Sigel rallied German-Americans to the Union cause in 1861 with the slogan, "I goes to fight mit Sigel." As a general, however, he was only modestly successful and his relationship with his superiors was so contentious that he resigned from the army twice before returning; only his ties to the politically important German-American constituency saved him. In addition, those ties allowed him to be promoted to command of the Department of West Virginia in 1864, but he led his troops to a disastrous defeat at the Battle of New Market on May 15, 1864, against Confederate forces that included cadets from the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. When a Confederate army under Jubal A. Early was able to reach the outskirts of Washington, D.C., a month later, Sigel was relieved of command and he resigned from the army a year later.
Wed, 26 May 2010 15:50:25 EST]]> /Marshall_George_C_1880-1959 Wed, 26 May 2010 15:43:22 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Marshall_George_C_1880-1959 George C. Marshall was a soldier-statesman who served the United States in times of war and peace as Chief of Staff of the Army, secretary of state, and the third secretary of defense. (The position had previously been known as secretary of war.) Having served as chief military advisor to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Marshall supervised the U.S. Army during World War II (1939–1945). As secretary of state he gave his name to the Marshall Plan, the primary plan of the United States for rebuilding the allied countries of Europe and repelling communism after World War II, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. Educated at the Virginia Military Institute, he was a longtime resident of Virginia.
Wed, 26 May 2010 15:43:22 EST]]> /Plecker_Walter_Ashby_1861-1947 Wed, 26 May 2010 15:13:15 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Plecker_Walter_Ashby_1861-1947 Walter Ashby Plecker was a physician and the first Virginia state registrar of vital statistics, a position he served in from 1912 to 1946. He was a staunch promoter of eugenics, a discredited movement aimed at scientifically proving white racial superiority and thereby justifying the marginalizing of non-white people. Employing Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924, Plecker effectively separated Virginia citizens into two simplified racial categories: white and colored. The law, which remained in effect until 1967, when it was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Loving v. Virginia , required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth, while criminalizing marriages between whites and non-whites. Plecker's policies used deceptive scientific evidence to deem blacks a lesser class of human beings, but they also targeted poor whites and anyone he or other eugenicists considered "feebleminded." Asserting that Virginia Indians were, in fact, "mixed-blooded negroes," Plecker also pressured state agencies into reclassifying Indians as "colored." The policy's legacy was effectively to erase "Indian" as an identity and has made it difficult for Virginia Indians to gain state and federal recognition.
Wed, 26 May 2010 15:13:15 EST]]> /Early_Jubal_A_1816-1894 Wed, 26 May 2010 15:07:01 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Early_Jubal_A_1816-1894 Jubal A. Early was a lawyer, a politician, and a Confederate general in the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). An excellent brigade and division commander, he was quick and aggressive on the offensive and steady and tough on the defensive. While, at times, he was outstanding in independent command or temporary corps command, especially at Chancellorsville (1863), he was less successful leading the Army of the Valley during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864. Known as "Old Jube," Early was opinionated and critical of others but slow to see his own faults. In an army famous for its religious revival, he was notoriously quick-tempered, witty, and profane; Robert E. Lee called him "my bad old man." Prematurely bent by arthritis, he was described by one Confederate in 1861 as "a plain farmer-looking man … but with all, every inch a soldier." In his later years, Early became preeminent in debates over the war, working to venerate Lee and isolate James Longstreet, who had once been Lee's second in command. In so doing, Early helped to invent the highly influential Lost Cause view of the war. As long as Early was alive, one of his former soldiers wrote, "no man ever took up his pen to write a line about the great conflict without the fear of Jubal Early before his eyes."
Wed, 26 May 2010 15:07:01 EST]]> /Willey_Waitman_T_1811-1900 Thu, 20 May 2010 15:30:43 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Willey_Waitman_T_1811-1900 Waitman T. Willey was a delegate to the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1850–1851, a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1861 that voted to secede from the Union, a United States senator from the Restored government of Virginia (1861–1863), and, alongside John S. Carlile, one of the first two United States senators from West Virginia (1863–1871). A native of western Virginia, he was instrumental in the formation of the new state of West Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). As a member of the U.S. Senate, he authored the Willey Amendment in 1863—a compromise on the question of the freedom of the state's African Americans that extinguished his hopes for compensated emancipation. Instead, it decreed that slaves younger than twenty-one years old on July 4, 1863, would become free once they reached that age. The compromise assured West Virginia's acceptance into the Union.
Thu, 20 May 2010 15:30:43 EST]]> /Dalton_John_N_1931-1986 Thu, 20 May 2010 15:26:36 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Dalton_John_N_1931-1986 John N. Dalton, a successful lawyer, businessman, and farmer, was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates (1966–1972) and the Senate of Virginia (1972–1973), and served as lieutenant governor (1974–1978) and as governor (1978–1982). He was the first Republican lieutenant governor of the twentieth century. His term as governor came during a period of dramatic realignment in which the Republican Party, long overshadowed by the Democratic Byrd Organization, became competitive in state elections for the first time in nearly a century. In fact, Dalton's rapid climb from state legislator to governor paralleled Virginia's transition from a one-party, Democratic state, typical of the "Solid South," to a competitive, two-party system. The third in a trio of Republican governors of Virginia during the 1970s, Dalton stressed economic development, conservative fiscal management, and Republican party-building.
Thu, 20 May 2010 15:26:36 EST]]> /Pentagon_The Thu, 20 May 2010 15:22:04 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pentagon_The The Pentagon, located in Arlington, Virginia, is home to the Department of Defense and serves as military headquarters for the United States. The enormous, 6.24-million-square-foot concrete structure is the largest office building in the world, covering thirty-four acres. Built to house the burgeoning War Department on the eve of the United States' entry into World War II (1939–1945), the headquarters was constructed in just seventeen months. From the moment Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall moved into the building in November 1942, the Pentagon has served as the focal point of American military planning and operations. Vital decisions regarding the D-Day invasion of Europe and the development of the atomic bomb were made at the Pentagon during World War II. In subsequent years the Pentagon has been the setting for many more critical decisions, from the Cold War and the Vietnam War (1961–1975) to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On September 11, 2001, terrorists flew a hijacked passenger jet into the Pentagon, killing 184 people and seriously damaging the building but not shutting it down. With its iconic, five-sided shape, the Pentagon is one of the world's most recognizable buildings and it has come to serve as a symbol of American military strength.
Thu, 20 May 2010 15:22:04 EST]]> /Davis_Westmoreland_1859-1942 Thu, 20 May 2010 15:17:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Davis_Westmoreland_1859-1942 Westmoreland Davis was a Democratic governor of Virginia from 1918 to 1922. During his term as governor, Davis streamlined the state's fiscal operations and reformed its penal system. An agricultural reformer, he also cofounded the Virginia State Dairymen's Association in 1907 and represented the Progressive farm lobby through his monthly journal the Southern Planter.
Thu, 20 May 2010 15:17:14 EST]]> /Martin_Thomas_Staples_1847-1919 Thu, 20 May 2010 15:12:58 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Martin_Thomas_Staples_1847-1919 Thomas Staples Martin was a railroad attorney, a longtime U.S. senator from Virginia (serving from 1895 until 1919), and an architect of the state Democratic Party machine that during his time was known as the Martin Organization. A quiet, behind-the-scenes political player, Martin rose through the party ranks largely due to his influence with powerful railroad interests. Under the leadership of Martin's mentor, John S. Barbour Jr., Democrats reestablished control of state politics that, since Reconstruction (1865–1877), had been in the hands of Republicans and Readjusters. Then, in 1893, in a huge and unexpected upset, Martin defeated former Confederate general and Virginia governor Fitzhugh Lee for election to Barbour's U.S. Senate seat, allowing him to take control of the party and, to a large extent, the state. Accused by his critics of bribery and corruption, Martin stayed in power and managed to rise to the position of Senate Majority Leader at least in part because of his pragmatic willingness to forge coalitions between the competing conservative and progressive wings of the Democratic Party. As a result, Martin's political machine and its successor, the Byrd Organization, dominated Virginia politics until the 1960s.
Thu, 20 May 2010 15:12:58 EST]]> /Kemper_James_Lawson_1823-1895 Thu, 20 May 2010 15:06:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Kemper_James_Lawson_1823-1895 James Lawson Kemper was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865), who later served as governor of Virginia (1874–1877). Kemper volunteered in the Mexican War (1846–1848), but returned to his civilian life as a lawyer. He served five terms in the Virginia House of Delegates (1853–1863), including time as Speaker of the House (1861–1863). There he garnered a reputation for honesty and attention to duty. Kemper volunteered for service in 1861, and with his promotion in June 1862 became the Confederacy's youngest brigade commander. Badly wounded at Gettysburg in July 1863, Kemper oversaw the Virginia Reserve Forces for the remainder of the war. He helped found the Conservative Party during Reconstruction (1865–1877). Soundly defeating the Republican candidate in the 1873 gubernatorial race, Kemper found himself, as governor, at odds with previous supporters over his progressive stance on civil rights, prison reform, and public school improvements. Still suffering from his wound, Kemper retired to his law practice, and died in Orange County in 1895.
Thu, 20 May 2010 15:06:06 EST]]> /Labor_in_Virginia_During_the_Twentieth_Century Wed, 19 May 2010 10:15:41 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Labor_in_Virginia_During_the_Twentieth_Century Wed, 19 May 2010 10:15:41 EST]]> /Stuart_Flora_Cooke_1836-1923 Tue, 18 May 2010 15:10:38 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Stuart_Flora_Cooke_1836-1923 Flora Cooke Stuart was the wife of Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart and the daughter of Union general Philip St. George Cooke. She met Stuart, a dashing subordinate of her father, while living in the Kansas Territory in the 1850s, and after marrying, the two settled in Virginia. Secession, however, split their family, with Cooke, a respected cavalryman, remaining in the United States Army and Stuart eventually becoming chief of cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia. "He will regret it but once & that will be continually," Stuart said of his father-in-law's decision; he even renamed his and Flora's months'-old son, Philip St. George Cooke Stuart, after himself, James Ewell Brown Stuart Jr. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Flora Stuart spent as much time as possible in camp with her husband, and chafed at the generous attention he received from admiring women in Virginia and across the South. When Stuart died after being wounded at the Battle of Yellow Tavern (1864), she donned mourning garb and wore it for the remaining fifty-nine years of her life. During that time, she served as headmistress of a women's school in Staunton that was subsequently named for her. She later moved to Norfolk, where she died in 1923.
Tue, 18 May 2010 15:10:38 EST]]> /Negro_Organization_Society Tue, 18 May 2010 14:29:10 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Negro_Organization_Society Tue, 18 May 2010 14:29:10 EST]]> /Walker_Maggie_Lena_1864-1934 Mon, 17 May 2010 10:23:41 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Walker_Maggie_Lena_1864-1934 Maggie Lena Walker was an African American entrepreneur and civic leader who broke traditional gender and discriminatory laws by becoming the first woman—white or black—to establish and become president of a bank in the United States—the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in Richmond. As of 2010, when it was known as Consolidated Bank and Trust Company, it was the oldest continually African American–operated bank in the United States. In her role as grand secretary of the Independent Order of St. Luke, Walker also was indispensable in organizing a variety of enterprises that advanced the African American community while expanding the public role of women. Although as an African American woman in the post–Civil War South she faced social, economic, and political barriers in her life and business ventures, Walker, by encouraging investment and collective action, achieved tangible improvements for African Americans.
Mon, 17 May 2010 10:23:41 EST]]> /Baldacci_David_1960- Mon, 17 May 2010 09:34:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Baldacci_David_1960- David Baldacci is a prolific and best-selling novelist who specializes in political and legal thrillers. His debut novel, Absolute Power (1996), about a murder involving the president of the United States, was adapted into a major film and helped to propel the Virginia native to further publishing success. In the years to follow, he produced thirteen consecutive best sellers, which have been published in more than forty languages in eighty countries, including Italy. Interestingly, early in his career, Baldacci adopted the pseudonym "David Ford" for the Italian editions of his books on the advice of his Italian publisher, who worried that otherwise he could not interest Italian readers.
Mon, 17 May 2010 09:34:56 EST]]> /Taylor_Henry_1942- Mon, 17 May 2010 09:30:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Taylor_Henry_1942- Henry Taylor is an accomplished poet whose work, while often set in the South and concerned with nostalgia, does not succumb to the melancholy sentimentality of the Lost Cause clichés. He has worked extensively as a translator of both ancient and modern European texts, and has published a volume of literary criticism. Taylor's career as a poet was firmly established when he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his poetry collection The Flying Change. He received the Golden Crane Award of the Washington Chapter of the American Literary Translators Association in 1989, was awarded the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984, and was inducted into the distinguished Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2001. His work has been praised for its technical skill and traditional forms.
Mon, 17 May 2010 09:30:17 EST]]> /Baker_Russell_1925- Mon, 17 May 2010 09:29:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Baker_Russell_1925- Russell Baker is a journalist, memoirist, essayist, humorist, and television personality who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, first in 1979 for distinguished commentary, and then in 1983 for his memoir Growing Up. He also has received numerous other awards, including honorary doctorates from more than a dozen universities.
Mon, 17 May 2010 09:29:00 EST]]> /Guerrilla_Warfare_in_Virginia_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 17 May 2010 09:28:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Guerrilla_Warfare_in_Virginia_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 17 May 2010 09:28:21 EST]]> /Cooke_Philip_St_George_1809-1895 Mon, 17 May 2010 09:26:39 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cooke_Philip_St_George_1809-1895 Mon, 17 May 2010 09:26:39 EST]]> /Great_Migration_The Fri, 14 May 2010 15:09:18 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Great_Migration_The Fri, 14 May 2010 15:09:18 EST]]> /Walker_Wyatt_Tee_1929- Fri, 14 May 2010 15:05:47 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Walker_Wyatt_Tee_1929- Fri, 14 May 2010 15:05:47 EST]]> /Grand_Fountain_of_the_United_Order_of_True_Reformers Fri, 14 May 2010 14:55:22 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Grand_Fountain_of_the_United_Order_of_True_Reformers Fri, 14 May 2010 14:55:22 EST]]> /Letcher_John_1813-1884 Fri, 14 May 2010 14:22:39 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Letcher_John_1813-1884 John Letcher was a lawyer, newspaper editor, member of the United States House of Representatives (1851–1859), and governor of Virginia (1860–1864) during the American Civil War (1861–1865). In a career that lasted decades, he weathered radical shifts of opinion and power by consistently positioning himself as a moderate, supporting, for instance, increased commercial ties between the eastern and western portions of the state and more political representation for western counties, codified in the Convention of 1850–1851. He advocated for a gradual emancipation of slaves and resisted the entreaties of radical secessionists while still arguing on behalf of states' rights. Western support and a divided Whig Party helped him narrowly win the governorship as a Democrat in 1859, but his term was often a difficult one. He ably mobilized Virginia for war and then threw the state's tremendous resources behind the Confederacy. But his willingness to requisition for the Confederacy needed supplies such as salt caused controversy at home, as did his support of impressments. Letcher returned to Lexington in 1864, ran for the Confederate Congress and lost, and was briefly imprisoned at the conclusion of the war. After his release, he resumed his law career, returning to state politics before dying in 1884.
Fri, 14 May 2010 14:22:39 EST]]> /Swanson_Claude_A_1862-1939 Thu, 13 May 2010 17:03:51 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Swanson_Claude_A_1862-1939 Claude A. Swanson was a powerful Democratic Party leader and one of the most successful Virginia politicians of his era. He served seven terms in the United States House of Representatives (1893–1906), was governor of Virginia from 1906 until 1910, and U.S. senator from 1910 until 1933. In addition, Swanson served as secretary of the United States Navy under U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 until his death in 1939. While in the House, Swanson presided over a raucous time in state politics that culminated in the adoption of the state Constitution of 1902 that was notorious for its disenfranchisement of African Americans and poor whites in spite of the universal suffrage called for by the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1870). As governor, he instituted a number of progressive reforms and continued to advance those reforms, as well as his belief in a strong U.S. Navy while in the U.S. Senate and in Roosevelt's cabinet.
Thu, 13 May 2010 17:03:51 EST]]> /Butler_Benjamin_F_1818-1893 Thu, 13 May 2010 08:36:46 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Butler_Benjamin_F_1818-1893 Benjamin F. Butler was a controversial, self-aggrandizing, and colorful politician who served as a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865). A state senator in Massachusetts, Butler was a delegate to the 1860 Democratic National Convention, where he briefly supported Jefferson Davis. Always popular, he was nevertheless dogged by charges of corruption, abuse of power, and, when he accepted a general officer's commission from Abraham Lincoln in 1861, incompetence. Even his appearance inspired commentary. A Union staff officer penned in his diary how Butler cut "an astounding figure on a horse! Short, fat, shapeless; no neck, squinting, and very bald headed, and, above all, that singular, half defiant look." During the Civil War, Butler made substantial contributions to the Union war effort, including a policy that allowed the United States government to skirt the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law by claiming that escaped slaves were "contraband of war." In this way, he was able to put African American refugees to work on fortifications and helped to pave the way for emancipation. He also served as a military administrator for occupied regions in Virginia and Louisiana—where he was particularly hated—before a lackluster performance as commander of the Army of the James during the Petersburg Campaign (1864–1865). After the war, Butler was elected governor of Massachusetts. He died in 1893.
Thu, 13 May 2010 08:36:46 EST]]> /Mourning_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 12 May 2010 16:19:04 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Mourning_During_the_Civil_War Mourning is the process of grieving the death of a loved one. In the mid-nineteenth century, middle- and upper-class Americans observed an elaborate set of rules that governed behavior following the death of a spouse or relative. The astronomical rate of death during the American Civil War (1861–1865) often hindered the mourning process, transformed the ways in which individuals and communities responded to death, and heightened women's public role in mourning traditions.
Wed, 12 May 2010 16:19:04 EST]]> /Munford_Mary-Cooke_Branch_1865-1938 Wed, 12 May 2010 15:52:24 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Munford_Mary-Cooke_Branch_1865-1938 Mary-Cooke Branch Munford was an advocate of woman suffrage, interracial cooperation, education, health, and labor reforms. Armed with a pedigree that connected her to some of the wealthiest families of Virginia, she threw herself into such "unfeminine" pursuits as education reform and civil rights. She helped to found the Richmond Education Association, was the first woman to serve on the city's school board, was a member of the University of Virginia's Board of Visitors, and was the first woman to serve on the College of William and Mary's Board of Visitors. Munford also served on the board of the National Urban League, was a founding member of the Virginia Inter-Racial League, and became a trustee at the historically black Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Wed, 12 May 2010 15:52:24 EST]]> /Bread_Riot_Richmond Wed, 12 May 2010 15:35:10 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bread_Riot_Richmond The Richmond Bread Riot, which took place in the Confederate capital of Richmond on April 2, 1863, was the largest and most destructive in a series of civil disturbances throughout the South during the third spring of the American Civil War (1861–1865). By 1863, the Confederate economy was showing signs of serious strain. Congress's passage of an Impressment Act, as well as a tax law deemed "confiscatory," led to hoarding and speculation, and spiraling inflation took its toll, especially on people living in the Confederacy's urban areas. When a group of hungry Richmond women took their complaints to Virginia governor John L. Letcher, he refused to see them. Their anger turned into a street march and attacks on commercial establishments. Only when troops were deployed and authorities threatened to fire on the mob did the rioters disperse. More than sixty men and women were arrested and tried, while the city stepped up its efforts to relieve the suffering of the poor and hungry.
Wed, 12 May 2010 15:35:10 EST]]> /Wilderness_During_the_Civil_War_The Wed, 12 May 2010 13:37:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Wilderness_During_the_Civil_War_The The Wilderness of Spotsylvania was a tightly forested area nearly twelve miles wide by six miles long; it was located south of the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers, ten miles west of Fredericksburg, in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), two major battles were fought there: Chancellorsville, in May 1863, where Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson famously outflanked Union forces under Joseph Hooker; and the Wilderness, in May 1864, where the Union's new general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant, initiated the Overland Campaign. The topography of the Wilderness—dense woods and thick undergrowth broken up by a number of small clearings—made the maneuvering of large armies particularly difficult and the experience of fighting claustrophobic. In both battles, burst shells ignited the woods, burning wounded soldiers. At Chancellorsville, Jackson was killed by a volley from his own men and, a year later, Confederate general James Longstreet was wounded, also by friendly fire.
Wed, 12 May 2010 13:37:56 EST]]> /Winder_John_H_1800-1865 Tue, 11 May 2010 13:57:20 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Winder_John_H_1800-1865 John H. Winder was a Confederate general who served as provost marshal of Richmond (1862–1864) and commissary general of Confederate prisons (1864–1865) during the American Civil War (1861–1865). A career military officer, Winder served with distinction during both the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) and the Mexican War (1846–1848), but faced criticism from Union officials and, subsequently, historians for his management of Richmond's wartime prisons and, beginning in June 1864, the notorious Andersonville Prison in Georgia. Described by his biographer as "short-tempered" and "aloof," Winder was responsible for the Castle Thunder, Belle Isle, and Libby prisons when they became infamous in the North for their poor conditions. While he was at Andersonville, the mortality rate of Union prisoners surged as a result of overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and poor rations. Winder's defenders argue that he struggled with an inefficient Confederate bureaucracy and scarce resources, and that he instituted policies, late in the war, that reduced the number of prisoner deaths. He died of a heart attack in February 1865; his subordinate at Andersonville, Henry H. Wirz, was hanged later that year.
Tue, 11 May 2010 13:57:20 EST]]> /Maury_Dabney_Herndon_1822-1900 Thu, 06 May 2010 17:00:45 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Maury_Dabney_Herndon_1822-1900 Dabney Herndon Maury was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The nephew of renowned scientist Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury, he fought in the Western Theater, rising quickly in the ranks after the battles of Pea Ridge, Iuka, and Corinth in 1862. As commander of the District of the Gulf in the war's last two years, he became known for his tenacious defense of the port of Mobile, Alabama. After the war, however, he struggled with poverty. In 1869, he helped to found the Southern Historical Society, which became an important institution for advocates of the Lost Cause view of the war. His 1894 memoir, Recollections of a Virginian in the Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars, was marked by Maury's distinctively intelligent affability. In fact, he was rare among former Civil War officers on either side for his willingness to maintain an equitable view of the Civil War.
Thu, 06 May 2010 17:00:45 EST]]> /Sailor_s_Creek_Battles_of Wed, 05 May 2010 12:27:37 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Sailor_s_Creek_Battles_of Wed, 05 May 2010 12:27:37 EST]]> /Potomac_River_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 03 May 2010 12:16:04 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Potomac_River_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 03 May 2010 12:16:04 EST]]> /Bucke_Richard_1581_or_1582-ca_1624 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:59:31 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bucke_Richard_1581_or_1582-ca_1624 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:59:31 EST]]> /Carter_Landon_1710-1778 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:56:08 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Carter_Landon_1710-1778 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:56:08 EST]]> /Berkeley_Frances_Culpeper_Stephens_1634-ca_1695 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:49:58 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Berkeley_Frances_Culpeper_Stephens_1634-ca_1695 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:49:58 EST]]> /Berkeley_Sir_William_1605-1677 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:47:24 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Berkeley_Sir_William_1605-1677 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:47:24 EST]]> /Gibson_Irene_Langhorne_1873-1956 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:22:41 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Gibson_Irene_Langhorne_1873-1956 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:22:41 EST]]> /Falwell_Jerry_1933-2007 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:16:30 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Falwell_Jerry_1933-2007 Mon, 03 May 2010 11:16:30 EST]]> /Bristol_Sessions_1927_The Mon, 03 May 2010 10:42:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bristol_Sessions_1927_The Mon, 03 May 2010 10:42:28 EST]]> /Burial_of_LatanAC._The Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:07:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Burial_of_LatanAC._The The Burial of Latané was one of the most famous Lost Cause images of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Painted by Virginian William D. Washington in Richmond in 1864, the work shows white women, slaves, and children performing the burial service of a cavalry officer killed during J. E. B. Stuart's famous ride around Union general George B. McClellan's army during the Peninsula Campaign in 1862. The incident first inspired a poem and then the painting, which became a powerful symbol of Confederate women's devotion to the Confederate cause.
Fri, 30 Apr 2010 15:07:21 EST]]> /Dale_Sir_Thomas_d_1619 Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:34:57 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Dale_Sir_Thomas_d_1619 Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:34:57 EST]]> /Drysdale_Hugh_1672_or_1673-1726 Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:28:42 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Drysdale_Hugh_1672_or_1673-1726 Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:28:42 EST]]> /Hard_War_in_Virginia_During_the_Civil_War Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:10:02 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hard_War_in_Virginia_During_the_Civil_War Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:10:02 EST]]> /Bacon_Nathaniel_1647-1676 Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:12:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bacon_Nathaniel_1647-1676 Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:12:56 EST]]> /Brown_Henry_Box_ca_1815 Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:40:01 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Brown_Henry_Box_ca_1815 Henry "Box" Brown was an African American antislavery activist who became famous in his day because of his successful escape from slavery in a wooden box. He wrote about his life in slavery, traveled from the United States to England speaking about the evils of the institution, and even worked as a magician.
Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:40:01 EST]]> /Virginia_Convention_of_1864 Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:56:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_Convention_of_1864 Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:56:03 EST]]> /Arlington_House Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:13:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Arlington_House Arlington House, also known as the Lee-Custis Mansion, overlooks Washington, D.C., from a rise across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia. Constructed between 1802 and 1818, it was one of the earliest and boldest expressions of the Greek Revival architectural style in America. Arlington House claims special historical significance through its association with the Washington and Custis families, and particularly with Robert E. Lee. After his family's departure in 1861 at the start of the American Civil War (1861–1865), Arlington House became a Union army facility. In 1863 the United States government established a Freedmen's Village on the property that was intended to serve as a model community for African Americans freed by the 1862 abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. Its location, meanwhile, was a striking reminder that Arlington had once been a slave labor–based plantation. In 1864 the federal government officially appropriated the grounds and there established Arlington National Cemetery, which continues to serve as a final resting place for members of the United States armed forces.
Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:13:06 EST]]> /Reston_Virginia Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:22:54 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Reston_Virginia Reston is a community in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area located in western Fairfax County, Virginia. Conceived as an alternative to ailing cities and sprawling suburbs, Reston, along with Columbia, Maryland, was among the first post–World War II "new towns" in the United States. Founded in 1964 by Robert E. Simon Jr., Reston took its name from Simon's initials and represented a kind of urban utopia—a place with swimming pools, community centers, and tennis courts in every neighborhood and no restrictions based on race. Control of the project was taken over first by Gulf Oil—Simon's major lender—and then Mobil, but the community grew steadily. Its 2007 population was approximately 60,000; the town, meanwhile, enjoys a strong economy based on high technology and information.
Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:22:54 EST]]> /Byrd_William_1674-1744 Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:14:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Byrd_William_1674-1744 William Byrd (also referred to as William Byrd II of Westover) was an early and successful Virginia planter who is best known today as a writer and bibliophile. In addition, he was a surveyor who led expeditions to determine the border between Virginia and Carolina and the location of what would become Virginia's capital, Richmond. He was a natural historian who was a member of the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge. And, finally, he was an entrepreneur who promoted Swiss immigration to settle southwestern Virginia and who explored an iron-mining venture in Germanna and Fredericksburg. The son of a Virginia planter and fur trader and the grandson of a London goldsmith, Byrd typified both the values of British colonial gentry and the ethos of an emerging American identity invested in self-improvement and the improvement of the colonial commonwealth.
Thu, 22 Apr 2010 10:14:06 EST]]> /Army_of_the_James Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:15:33 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Army_of_the_James The Army of the James was an independent Union command during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Established in April 1864, it consisted of two corps, along with a small cavalry division, and was led by the largely inept political general Benjamin F. Butler. The new Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant had created the force with the intention that it assist in his Overland Campaign by approaching the Confederate capital at Richmond from the south and east. The Army of the Potomac under George G. Meade would attack from the north. Butler stalled on the Bermuda Hundred Peninsula, however, and historians have largely blamed his bungling for the army's ineffectiveness. Still, the Army of the James was important for its technological innovations and for the large number of African American troops in its ranks. Black troops in the army's Twenty-fifth Corps were among the first Union troops to enter Richmond on April 3, 1865.
Tue, 20 Apr 2010 14:15:33 EST]]> /Poverty_and_Poor_Relief_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:36:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Poverty_and_Poor_Relief_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:36:14 EST]]> /CSS_Virginia Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:34:48 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/CSS_Virginia The CSS Virginia was an ironclad ship in the Confederate navy during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The first American warship of its kind—prior to 1862, all navy vessels were made of wood—it was constructed in order to attack the ever-tightening Union blockade on the Confederacy's major Atlantic ports and harbors. The CSS Virginia's launch in March 1862 provided one of the first truly unmistakable signs of a revolution in naval warfare that would transform the conduct of war at sea during the nineteenth century. It quickly met its match, however, in a hastily constructed, Swedish-engineered Union ironclad, the USS Monitor, at the Battle of Hampton Roads (1862). By April 1862, the Confederacy's 3,500 miles of coastline were largely lost (only Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina, remained under Confederate control), and in May of that year, the Virginia was intentionally destroyed.
Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:34:48 EST]]> /James_River_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:33:16 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/James_River_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:33:16 EST]]> /Jefferson_Davis_s_Imprisonment Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:19:01 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Jefferson_Davis_s_Imprisonment Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:19:01 EST]]> /McDowell_Battle_of Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:46:01 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/McDowell_Battle_of The Battle of McDowell, fought May 8, 1862, was a costly but important Confederate victory that came near the beginning of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's brilliant Shenandoah Valley Campaign during the American Civil War (1861–1865). As Union general George B. McClellan prepared to march his Army of the Potomac up the Virginia Peninsula and on to Richmond, Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston entrusted Jackson with preventing Union troops in the Shenandoah Valley from reinforcing McClellan. After a defeat at the Battle of Kernstown on March 23, Jackson retreated south, where his Army of the Valley joined with Edward "Allegheny" Johnson's Army of the Northwest and a reinforcing division under Richard S. Ewell. The Confederates, ensconced atop Sitlington's Hill on the west side of Bull Pasture Mountain, fended off the uphill attacks of Robert H. Milroy's Union troops in fighting that lasted until darkness fell. At one point General Johnson shouted a dare to Union forces to flank him, and although they failed, they did severely wound him. Confederates lost many more killed during the fray, but still counted the battle as a victory. McDowell set the stage for the rest of Jackson's hard-marching, hard-fighting campaign that, over the next month, kept Union troops penned up in the Valley.
Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:46:01 EST]]> /Carter_William_Richard_1833-1864 Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:55:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Carter_William_Richard_1833-1864 Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:55:14 EST]]> /Mine_Run_Campaign Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:49:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Mine_Run_Campaign Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:49:14 EST]]> /Blackford_W_W_1831-1905 Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:25:48 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Blackford_W_W_1831-1905 Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:25:48 EST]]> /Yellow_Tavern_Battle_of Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:22:49 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Yellow_Tavern_Battle_of Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:22:49 EST]]> /Bristoe_Station_Battle_of Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:04:58 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bristoe_Station_Battle_of Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:04:58 EST]]> /Five_Forks_Battle_of Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:37:34 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Five_Forks_Battle_of Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:37:34 EST]]> /Kernstown_Battle_of Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:31:43 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Kernstown_Battle_of Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:31:43 EST]]> /Conrad_Thomas_Nelson_1837-1905 Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:12:02 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Conrad_Thomas_Nelson_1837-1905 Mon, 29 Mar 2010 12:12:02 EST]]> /Hotchkiss_Jedediah_1828-1899 Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:31:43 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hotchkiss_Jedediah_1828-1899 Jedediah Hotchkiss served as a staff officer to Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson during the American Civil War (1861–1865). A New York native, Hotchkiss opened a school in 1859 in Augusta County. His specialty, however, was mapmaking, and his topographical skills proved to be crucial to Jackson's success during his famous Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862. Thanks to Hotchkiss's maps, Jackson always had ample knowledge of the geographic setting within which he was operating and a good appreciation of the terrain he would put to use against the enemy.
Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:31:43 EST]]> /Causes_of_Confederate_Defeat_in_the_Civil_War Thu, 25 Mar 2010 10:05:05 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Causes_of_Confederate_Defeat_in_the_Civil_War Thu, 25 Mar 2010 10:05:05 EST]]> /Taylor_Walter_H_1838-1916 Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:54:54 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Taylor_Walter_H_1838-1916 Walter H. Taylor served for most of the American Civil War (1861–1865) as adjutant to Robert E. Lee, overseeing the paperwork and administrative functions of the Confederate general's commands. A businessman and banker before and after the war, Taylor is best known for writing books that defended the reputations of Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, books that today are considered to be important contributions to Lost Cause literature.
Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:54:54 EST]]> /Green_Charles_C_et_al_v_County_School_Board_of_New_Kent_County_Virginia Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:04:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Green_Charles_C_et_al_v_County_School_Board_of_New_Kent_County_Virginia Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:04:03 EST]]> /Richmond_and_Danville_Railroad_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:50:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Richmond_and_Danville_Railroad_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:50:56 EST]]> /Fredericksburg_Second_Battle_of Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:16:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Fredericksburg_Second_Battle_of Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:16:21 EST]]> /Cedar_Mountain_Battle_of Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:07:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cedar_Mountain_Battle_of Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:07:35 EST]]> /Civil_War_Pensions Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:05:44 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Civil_War_Pensions Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:05:44 EST]]> /Mechanicsville_Battle_of Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:32:29 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Mechanicsville_Battle_of Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:32:29 EST]]> /Savage_s_Station_Battle_of Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:29:20 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Savage_s_Station_Battle_of Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:29:20 EST]]> /Botetourt_Artillery Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:18:30 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Botetourt_Artillery Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:18:30 EST]]> /Washington_College_During_the_Civil_War Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:14:27 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Washington_College_During_the_Civil_War Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:14:27 EST]]> /Confederate_Morale_during_the_Civil_War Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:08:45 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Confederate_Morale_during_the_Civil_War Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:08:45 EST]]> /Rockingham_Rebellion Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:52:12 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Rockingham_Rebellion Mon, 15 Mar 2010 14:52:12 EST]]> /North_Anna_Battle_of Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:58:52 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/North_Anna_Battle_of The Battle of North Anna was fought May 23–26, 1864, during the American Civil War (1861–1865). It came three days after the bloody Battle of Spotsylvania Court House during the Overland Campaign of 1864, the spring offensive in which the Union army's new general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant, stubbornly pursued Confederate general Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia all the way to the Confederate capital of Richmond. A number of small engagements along the North Anna River in central Virginia rather than a single pitched fight, the battle marked one of many instances when Lee managed to outmaneuver his more powerful foe. Still, the Battle of North Anna highlighted the exhaustion of both armies and led Grant to believe that the Confederates were nearing defeat.
Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:58:52 EST]]> /Port_Republic_Battle_of Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:54:31 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Port_Republic_Battle_of Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:54:31 EST]]> /First_Rockbridge_Artillery Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:07:59 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/First_Rockbridge_Artillery Mon, 15 Mar 2010 11:07:59 EST]]> /Confederate_Impressment_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:12:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Confederate_Impressment_During_the_Civil_War Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:12:00 EST]]> /Chimborazo_Hospital Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:50:55 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chimborazo_Hospital Chimborazo Hospital, located in the Confederate capital of Richmond, was the largest and most famous medical facility in the South during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The hospital admitted nearly 78,000 patients suffering from battlefield wounds and diseases. Of this number, approximately 6,500 to 8,000 died, resulting in a mortality rate of about 9 percent. Few hospitals in the Confederacy had lower mortality rates, and those that did generally received patients who were further along in their recovery. The best-staffed and -equipped Union hospitals, in comparison, achieved a 10 percent mortality rate. With no model to draw on, Chimborazo Hospital's success can be attributed to a combination of its open-air, pavilion-style design; the comparatively good quality of care; innovative practices; and the supreme dedication of the caregivers—men and women, black and white, slave and free. Their efforts contributed to one of the great advancements in mid-nineteenth-century medicine: the acceptance of hospital care for the sick and injured, which was a concept not embraced in America prior to 1865.
Thu, 11 Mar 2010 11:50:55 EST]]> /Desegregation_in_Higher_Education Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:54:47 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Desegregation_in_Higher_Education The desegregation of higher education in Virginia was the result of a long legal and social process that began after the American Civil War (1861–1865) and did not end before the 1970s. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" public accommodations for blacks and whites were constitutional in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the court established a sturdy legal basis for segregation. This ruling encouraged the Jim Crow era of legalized discrimination against blacks in the south. But the terminology of "separate but equal" eventually also created an opening for African Americans to demand educational opportunities and facilities equal to those available to whites. Educational opportunities for blacks were vastly inferior to whites, and segregation in higher education was entrenched in Virginia through World War II (1941–1945). But during the 1950s and 1960s, the first black students entered various graduate programs at the University of Virginia and the College of William and Mary, then undergraduate engineering programs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Virginia, and finally general undergraduate programs at all historically white colleges and universities. In 1935 Alice Jackson failed to win admission to a graduate program at the University of Virginia, but Gregory Swanson, with the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a ruling from a federal court, gained admission to the university's law school in 1950. Admittance into programs did not mean an immediate end to unfair and unequal treatment on campus, but by 1972 black students were able to enroll in Virginia in any curriculum and also live and eat in campus facilities.
Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:54:47 EST]]> /Byrne_Leslie_1946- Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:53:38 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Byrne_Leslie_1946- Leslie Byrne was the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress from Virginia, serving as a Democrat for one term, from January 3, 1993, until January 3, 1995. Byrne emerged as a skilled fund-raiser and hard-nosed campaigner, but her tenure in Congress was marked by Democratic defeats over health care issues and her own sometimes difficult relationships with fellow representatives. In addition to her term in Congress, Byrne served in the House of Delegates (1986–1992) and the Senate of Virginia (2000–2003). She also served as the White House Director of Consumer Affairs under U.S. president Bill Clinton.
Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:53:38 EST]]> /Barron_Samuel_1809-1888 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:21:48 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Barron_Samuel_1809-1888 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:21:48 EST]]> /Shenandoah_Valley_Campaign_of_1862 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:49:52 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Shenandoah_Valley_Campaign_of_1862 The Shenandoah Valley Campaign, conducted from February to June 1862 during the American Civil War (1861–1865), catapulted Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson from relative obscurity to the first rank of Southern generals. In six small engagements—at Kernstown, McDowell, Front Royal, Winchester, Cross Keys, and Port Republic—Jackson tied down large Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley that otherwise would have been used—probably decisively—in a Union offensive against the Confederate capital at Richmond. Jackson drove his troops hard and fast, outpacing and outsmarting an array of Union generals, including Nathaniel P. Banks, Irvin McDowell, John C. Frémont, James Shields, Robert H. Milroy, and Robert C. Schenck. In the process, he arrested and recommended for court-martial one of his own—Richard B. Garnett—and lost to battle another, the cavalry general Turner Ashby. In addition to its strategic importance, the victorious campaign also provided a huge boost to Southern morale at a time when the Confederacy had suffered through a springtime of defeats. As Jackson said early in the campaign, "If the Valley is lost, Virginia is lost."
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:49:52 EST]]> /Archer_Fletcher_H_1817-1902 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:34:30 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Archer_Fletcher_H_1817-1902 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:34:30 EST]]> /Burch_Thomas_Granville_1869-1951 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:04:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Burch_Thomas_Granville_1869-1951 Thomas Granville Burch was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1931–1946) and briefly served in the U.S. Senate (1946). As a congressman he represented an eight-county district in southern Virginia along the North Carolina border. Reapportionment added a ninth county beginning with the 74th Congress. A colleague of the conservative Democratic U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd, Burch was briefly considered by Byrd and his advisers as a gubernatorial candidate for the 1937 election; however, Burch's unorthodox plan for teacher pay upset the Byrd Organization, which removed him from the inner circle of Virginia politics.
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:04:32 EST]]> /Ambler_James_M_1848-1881 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:00:04 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ambler_James_M_1848-1881 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:00:04 EST]]> /Allan_William_1837-1889 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:55:31 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Allan_William_1837-1889 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:55:31 EST]]> /Seven_Pines_Battle_of Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:42:19 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Seven_Pines_Battle_of Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:42:19 EST]]> /Alfriend_Edward_M_1837-1901 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:16:29 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Alfriend_Edward_M_1837-1901 Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:16:29 EST]]> /Malvern_Hill_Battle_of Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:01:33 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Malvern_Hill_Battle_of The Battle of Malvern Hill, fought on July 1, 1862, and the final engagement of the Seven Days' Battles, resulted in a Confederate defeat, yet it still managed to halt Union general George B. McClellan's offensive up the Peninsula and against the Confederate capital at Richmond during the American Civil War (1861–1865). After a week of hard marching and maneuvering, the new Confederate commander, Robert E. Lee, decided to attack McClellan full-on at Malvern Hill, where the Union general had massed his artillery. His assault was piecemeal, however, and bloodily repelled, prompting Confederate general D. H. Hill to remark that "it was not war—it was murder."
Mon, 08 Mar 2010 11:01:33 EST]]> /Moton_School_Strike_and_Prince_Edward_County_School_Closings Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:14:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Moton_School_Strike_and_Prince_Edward_County_School_Closings On April 23, 1951, students at Robert Russa Moton High School in the town of Farmville, in Prince Edward County, walked out of school to protest the conditions of their education, which they claimed were vastly inferior to those enjoyed by white students at nearby Farmville High School. The strike, led by student Barbara Johns, is considered by many historians to signal the start of the desegregation movement in America and resulted in a court case that was later bundled with other, similar cases into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown by mandating public-school desegregation, and Virginia state leaders responded with an official policy of Massive Resistance. When, on January 19, 1959, both a federal and a state court simultaneously ruled the state's actions unconstitutional, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors closed its public schools rather than integrate them. They stayed shuttered for five years. Another U.S. Supreme Court decision—Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward—finally forced the county's schools to reopen in 1964.
Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:14:00 EST]]> /Pickett_George_E_1825-1875 Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:18:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pickett_George_E_1825-1875 George E. Pickett was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865) and one of the most controversial leaders in the Army of Northern Virginia. Described by his admirers as swashbuckling, he was famous for his tailored uniforms, gold spurs, and shoulder-length brown hair. (His contemporary admirers were relatively few in number, however, and this image of Pickett is likely more myth than fact.) Confederate general James Longstreet commented on his friend's "wondrous pulchritude and magnetic presence" and is said to have mentored Pickett, who was last in his class at West Point. At Gettysburg (1863), Pickett's name became permanently linked, in both fact and myth, with Pickett's Charge, the doomed frontal assault on the battle's third day. He had little responsibility for the attack's planning or its failure, and the loss of his division, which he partly blamed on Robert E. Lee, devastated him. Accused of war crimes for executing twenty-two Union prisoners in 1864, Pickett ended the war broken and in bad health. His reputation, however, was thoroughly rehabilitated after his death by his third wife, LaSalle Corbell Pickett, whose writings turned the often incompetent general into an idealized Lost Cause hero.
Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:18:17 EST]]> /Pickett_LaSalle_Corbell_1843-1931 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:19:43 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pickett_LaSalle_Corbell_1843-1931 LaSalle Corbell Pickett was a prolific author and lecturer, and the third wife of George E. Pickett, the Confederate general best known for his participation in the doomed frontal assault known as Pickett's Charge during the American Civil War (1861–1865). After her husband's death in 1875, she traveled the country to promote a highly romanticized version of his life and military career that was generally at odds with the historical record. George Pickett emerged from the war with a strained relationship with Robert E. Lee—whom he partly blamed for the destruction of his division at Gettysburg (1863)—and accused of war crimes. But in his wife's history, Pickett and His Men (1899), this not-always-competent soldier was transformed into the ideal Lost Cause hero, "gallant and graceful as a knight of chivalry riding to a tournament." This image largely stuck in the American consciousness, leaving historians to spend much of the next century attempting to separate Pickett from his myth.
Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:19:43 EST]]> /Dillard_Annie_1945- Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:01:57 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Dillard_Annie_1945- Annie Dillard is a poet, essayist, and memoirist known for her intensely poetic and precise prose and her exploration of the natural environment. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dillard graduated from Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, where she married her writing instructor and mentor while still an undergraduate. In 1975, she won the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction for her collection of narrative essays, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. The book, which brought Dillard quick and unexpected fame, was inspired by her stay in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and partly modeled on Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854), the subject of her master's thesis topic. Dillard taught in Washington State before joining the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, in 1979, first as a scholar-in-residence and then, in 1983, as a full professor.
Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:01:57 EST]]> /Wilderness_Battle_of_the Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:09:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Wilderness_Battle_of_the The Battle of the Wilderness, fought May 5–6, 1864, was the opening engagement of the Overland Campaign during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The newly appointed general-in-chief of the Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant, personally led the Army of the Potomac south across the Rapidan River in what he hoped would be a quick maneuver around the right flank of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. Instead, Lee engaged Grant where he had engaged Joseph Hooker almost exactly a year earlier—in the seventy-square-mile patch of tangled undergrowth known as the Wilderness. The battle that resulted was uncoordinated, bloody, and often confused, with a testy Grant pressing Lee's men on May 5 and very nearly breaking through the Confederate lines on May 6. Lee was famously restrained by his men from leading a countercharge, and his top lieutenant, James Longstreet, was seriously wounded when he was accidently shot by Virginia troops near the spot where, at Chancellorsville the year before, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson had been similarly wounded. Unlike Jackson, Longstreet survived, and amid burning trees the Confederates won a tactical victory. Grant, however, refused to turn back, confronting Lee again and again until finally stalling before Petersburg.
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:09:32 EST]]> /Buck_v_Bell_1927 Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:58:34 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Buck_v_Bell_1927 Buck v. Bell was a 1927 ruling handed down by the United States Supreme Court that affirmed the constitutionality of a 1924 Virginia law empowering the commonwealth to sterilize individuals deemed genetically "unfit." Ruling that "the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. authorized the sterilization of Carrie Buck. Some thirty states then enforced sterilization laws. At least 60,000 Americans were sterilized between 1927 and the 1970s. In 1933, Nazi Germany modeled its eugenics laws after Virginia's.
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:58:34 EST]]> /Lee_Robert_Edward_ca_1806-1870 Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:21:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Lee_Robert_Edward_ca_1806-1870 Robert Edward Lee was a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865) who led the Army of Northern Virginia from June 1862 until its surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. Descended from several of Virginia's First Families, Lee was a well-regarded officer of the United States Army before the war. His decision to fight for the Confederacy was emblematic of the wrenching choices faced by Americans as the nation divided. After an early defeat in western Virginia, he repulsed George B. McClellan's army from the Confederate capital during the Seven Days' Battles (1862) and won stunning victories at Manassas (1862), Fredericksburg (1862), and Chancellorsville (1863). The Maryland and Pennsylvania campaigns he led resulted in major contests at Antietam (1862) and Gettysburg (1863), respectively, with severe consequences for the Confederacy. Lee offered a spirited defense during the Overland Campaign (1864) against Ulysses S. Grant, but was ultimately outmaneuvered and forced into a prolonged siege at Petersburg (1864–1865).
Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:21:56 EST]]> /Roberts_Ruby_Altizer_1907-2004 Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:00:47 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Roberts_Ruby_Altizer_1907-2004 Ruby Altizer Roberts is the author of two collections of poetry, three memoirs, a children's book, and a genealogy. She was named Virginia's first female poet laureate in 1950 and, until 1994, was the only woman to have held the post. In addition, Roberts edited the poetry journal The Lyric from 1952 until 1977. In 1961 she received an honorary doctor of humanities degree from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, and in 1992, the General Assembly designated her Poet Laureate Emerita of Virginia.
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:00:47 EST]]> /Belitt_Ben_1911-2003 Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:09:04 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Belitt_Ben_1911-2003 Ben Belitt was an American poet and translator born in New York City and educated at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. He was a professor of comparative literature for fifty years at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. In his long life, he published eight books of poems, two books of essays, and numerous translations, notably of the Spanish-language poets Jorge Luis Borges, Federico García Lorca, and Pablo Neruda. This Scribe, My Hand, his complete poems, was published in 1998. Belitt's reputation is that of a vital and gifted poet who was somewhat under-recognized in comparison to his peers.
Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:09:04 EST]]> /Dabney_Robert_Lewis_1820-1898 Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:45:12 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Dabney_Robert_Lewis_1820-1898 Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:45:12 EST]]> /Crutchfield_Stapleton_1835-1865 Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:56:52 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Crutchfield_Stapleton_1835-1865 Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:56:52 EST]]> /Gaines_s_Mill_Battle_of Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:50:01 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Gaines_s_Mill_Battle_of Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:50:01 EST]]> /James_River_Squadron Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:24:43 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/James_River_Squadron The James River Squadron was one of the eight major forces that the Confederate States Navy created to defend its rivers and waterways during the American Civil War (1861–1865). At its apogee, the squadron consisted of three steam-powered ironclad warships—including the CSS Virginia, which famously dueled the Union's ironclad USS Monitor at the Battle of Hampton Roads (1862)—and more than a half-dozen small gunboats, converted civilian vessels, and torpedo boats. As was true with the Confederacy's other naval forces, the James River Squadron saws little action and was destroyed by its own men as a result of the defeat of Confederate land forces.
Tue, 02 Feb 2010 11:24:43 EST]]> /Gordonsville_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:59:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Gordonsville_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:59:03 EST]]> /Pope_John_1822-1892 Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:47:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pope_John_1822-1892 John Pope was a Union general during the American Civil War (1861–1865) with a reputation for outspokenness and arrogance. After serving in the Mexican War (1846–1848) as an engineer, the West Point graduate fought well in the West during 1861 and 1862, prompting U.S. president Abraham Lincoln to transfer him east. There, he exacerbated his already bad relations with Union generals George B. McClellan and Fitz-John Porter by issuing a proclamation trumpeting his own generalship. When he declared that he would make his "headquarters in the saddle," some quipped that he had mistaken his hindquarters for his headquarters, and when he announced a series of hard-war policies aimed at punishing Confederate civilians, Confederate general Robert E. Lee labeled him a "miscreant." At the head of the new Army of Virginia, Pope got the opportunity to confront Lee at the Second Battle of Manassas in August 1862 but was soundly defeated. Pope was transferred to the Dakotas, where he fought against Indians in the aftermath of the Sioux Uprising (1862). During Reconstruction (1865–1877), he held military administrative posts in the South. He died in 1892.
Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:47:32 EST]]> /Army_of_the_Valley Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:59:09 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Army_of_the_Valley Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:59:09 EST]]> /Charlottesville_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:37:38 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Charlottesville_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:37:38 EST]]> /Weather_During_the_Civil_War Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:56:59 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Weather_During_the_Civil_War Thu, 28 Jan 2010 09:56:59 EST]]> /Corprew_E_G_ca_1830-1881 Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:16:09 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Corprew_E_G_ca_1830-1881 Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:16:09 EST]]> /Munford_Robert_d_1783 Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:46:09 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Munford_Robert_d_1783 Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:46:09 EST]]> /Aulick_John_H_ca_1791-1873 Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:45:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Aulick_John_H_ca_1791-1873 Thu, 14 Jan 2010 16:45:28 EST]]> /Hollins_Critic_The Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:11:44 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hollins_Critic_The Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:11:44 EST]]> /Holladay_Cary_C_1958- Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:07:20 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Holladay_Cary_C_1958- Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:07:20 EST]]> /Hankla_Cathryn_1958- Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:03:52 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hankla_Cathryn_1958- Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:03:52 EST]]> /Edmunds_Murrell_1898-1981 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:58:55 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Edmunds_Murrell_1898-1981 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:58:55 EST]]> /Cox_Lucy_Ann_White_d_1891 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:53:49 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cox_Lucy_Ann_White_d_1891 Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:53:49 EST]]> /Chitwood_Michael_1958- Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:36:55 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chitwood_Michael_1958- Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:36:55 EST]]> /Brock_Sarah_Ann_1831-1911 Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:20:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Brock_Sarah_Ann_1831-1911 Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:20:35 EST]]> /Braxton_Carter_Moore_1836-1898 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:20:23 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Braxton_Carter_Moore_1836-1898 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:20:23 EST]]> /Butt_Martha_Haines_1833-1871 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:06:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Butt_Martha_Haines_1833-1871 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:06:32 EST]]> /Bryan_Daniel_ca_1789-1866 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:48:44 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bryan_Daniel_ca_1789-1866 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:48:44 EST]]> /Bryan_John_Stewart_1871-1944 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:30:44 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bryan_John_Stewart_1871-1944 John Stewart Bryan was a Richmond newspaper publisher and president of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. The son of a wealthy and influential newspaper publisher, Bryan went into the family business after briefly practicing law. In 1900, he began work as a reporter at the Richmond Dispatch, owned by his father, Joseph Bryan, and within a year was vice president of the holding company. Upon his father's death in 1908, he became president of the company and owner and publisher of the Richmond News Leader. There he hired as editor Douglas Southall Freeman, who went on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for his historical writing. In 1934, Bryan became president of the College of William and Mary and worked to broaden the school's curriculum and strengthening its reputation as a liberal arts college. Problems at one of the school's affiliates, in Norfolk, however, caused a suspension of the college's national accreditation in 1941. Citing poor health and the need for new leadership, Bryan resigned in 1942 and died in Richmond two years later.
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:30:44 EST]]> /Breckinridge_Cary_1839-1918 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:23:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Breckinridge_Cary_1839-1918 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 15:23:17 EST]]> /Braxton_A_Caperton_1862-1914 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:51:25 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Braxton_A_Caperton_1862-1914 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:51:25 EST]]> /Bolling_Robert_1738-1775 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:40:31 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bolling_Robert_1738-1775 Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:40:31 EST]]> /Bausch_Richard_1945- Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:22:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bausch_Richard_1945- Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:22:32 EST]]> /Bausch_Robert_1945- Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:13:48 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bausch_Robert_1945- Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:13:48 EST]]> /Grisham_John_1955- Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:00:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Grisham_John_1955- John Grisham is the bestselling author of popular fiction and legal-themed thrillers whose work has been translated into more than thirty languages and adapted into numerous feature films. Many of Grisham's novels portray the legal profession as cynical and corrupt. His best-known novel, The Firm (1991), centers on a recent Harvard Law School graduate who, after learning that his firm is heavily involved in organized crime, risks his life to help the FBI indict his associates and their Mob bosses. In 1983, Grisham was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives as a Democrat, and served until 1990, while continuing to work at his law practice in Southaven, Mississippi. Since retiring from the law, Grisham has written, in addition to his thrillers, literary fiction and nonfiction, and has become involved in philanthropic efforts in Virginia, where he now lives part of the year.
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:00:06 EST]]> /Cornwell_Patricia_1956- Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:33:13 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cornwell_Patricia_1956- Patricia Cornwell is the prolific author of best-selling crime novels, as well as a major history of Jack the Ripper. Her Kay Scarpetta crime novels pioneered the detailed use of forensic science in detective fiction and have received a number of major English-language awards in the genre, as well as many international honors. Although Cornwell now resides in Massachusetts, her literary success was a Virginia phenomenon and her most successful works are set there. She lived in Richmond for more than twenty years and gained an intimate knowledge of forensic science through her job at Richmond's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where she worked occasionally in the morgue. Patricia Cornwell remains the city's most famous crime writer since Edgar Allan Poe—in Trace (2004), one of the Scarpetta novels, she even pays tongue-in-cheek homage to Poe in the character of Edgar Allan Pogue.
Mon, 11 Jan 2010 11:33:13 EST]]> /Battle_John_Stewart_1890-1972 Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:42:59 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Battle_John_Stewart_1890-1972 John Stewart Battle was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates (1930–1934) and the Senate of Virginia (1934–1950), and served as governor of Virginia (1950–1954). A loyal Democrat in line with the Byrd Organization, the state machine run by U.S. senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., Battle overcame a spirited challenge by three fellow Democrats to win the 1949 gubernatorial primary. His greatest achievement as governor was a massive school construction program to accommodate the first wave of the baby boom. Battle gained national recognition when he addressed the 1952 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, in an effort to prevent the Virginia delegation from losing its vote due to a disagreement over a loyalty oath. Although the U.S. Supreme Court did not announce its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas—which mandated the desegregation of public schools—until after Battle left office, civil rights issues were emerging during his term. In a somewhat ironic end to his public service, Battle, a segregationist, was appointed by U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1957.
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:42:59 EST]]> /Robb_Charles_S_1939- Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:29:18 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Robb_Charles_S_1939- Charles S. "Chuck" Robb served as lieutenant governor (1978–1982) and governor of Virginia (1982–1986) and for two terms as U.S. senator (1989–2001). The son-in-law of U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson, Robb entered Virginia politics as a "celebrity" without the customary résumé of serving in lower office. A Democrat, Robb was instrumental in reviving his party's fortunes in the state after a period of Republican dominance. His election in 1981 ushered in the first of three consecutive Democratic governorships. A moderate, Robb also played a role in national politics, moving his party to the center but never seeking national office himself. His promising career was tarnished by a series of scandals and he was ultimately defeated for reelection in 2000.
Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:29:18 EST]]> /Racial_Integrity_Laws_of_the_1920s Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:27:36 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Racial_Integrity_Laws_of_the_1920s The Racial Integrity Laws, which included the Racial Integrity Act (RIA) of 1924, were a series of legislative efforts designed to protect "whiteness" against what many Virginians perceived to be the effects of immigration and race-mixing. Passed in the context of a national surge in nativism, racism, and sexism, these laws explicitly defined how people should be classified—for example, as white, black, or Indian—and then, through Virginia's newly created Bureau of Vital Statistics under the direction of Dr. Walter Plecker, aggressively policed the distinctions. Elite white Virginians, often belonging to the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America (ASCOA), worried that their efforts on behalf of white supremacy might be confused with the more violent work of the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, they used the RIA to recast racial bigotry as progressive, scientific social policy. There was some social and political backlash against the laws, but not enough to overturn them until the U.S. Supreme Court's 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia, which declared Virginia's ban on interracial marriage to be unconstitutional. Most of Virginia's Indians, meanwhile, had been classified by the RIA as racially black, a designation that continues to be an obstacle for federal tribal recognition.
Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:27:36 EST]]> /Holton_A_Linwood_1923- Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:12:09 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Holton_A_Linwood_1923- A. Linwood Holton was a governor of Virginia (1970–1974) and the first Republican to hold the office since Reconstruction (1865–1877). Hailing from Big Stone Gap in southwest Virginia, Holton was among the "Mountain and Valley" Republicans who began to gain statewide support in the 1950s in opposition to the Byrd Organization and in support of public school desegregation. Holton won a narrow race for governor in 1969 with a coalition that included a substantial number of African American and white working-class voters. As governor, he declared an end to Massive Resistance, the state's anti–desegregation policy, announcing, "The era of defiance is behind us." In 1970, he was photographed escorting his daughter Tayloe into a nearly all-black high school in Richmond. In addition, Holton reorganized the executive branch, worked to clean Virginia's polluted waters, and helped create a unified Ports Authority in Hampton Roads. He was not able to overcome increasing factionalism among state Republicans, however, and the party lost a series of statewide elections in the 1970s. A bold and decisive progressive on matters of race relations, he did much to break the Democrats' one-party dominance of Virginia's political life. He was less successful at imprinting his own moderate conservative philosophy on the Virginia Republican Party.
Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:12:09 EST]]> /Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:22:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:22:32 EST]]> /Voigt_Ellen_Bryant_1943- Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:12:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Voigt_Ellen_Bryant_1943- Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:12:00 EST]]> /Meade_Julian_R_1909-1940 Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:09:01 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Meade_Julian_R_1909-1940 Fri, 18 Dec 2009 16:09:01 EST]]> /Haines_John_Meade_1924- Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:19:58 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Haines_John_Meade_1924- Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:19:58 EST]]> /Hairston_Jerome_1974- Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:16:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hairston_Jerome_1974- Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:16:14 EST]]> /Chrysler_Museum_of_Art Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:01:52 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chrysler_Museum_of_Art Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:01:52 EST]]> /Loring-Jackson_Incident Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:31:46 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Loring-Jackson_Incident Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:31:46 EST]]> /Magill_Mary_Tucker_1830-1899 Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:53:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Magill_Mary_Tucker_1830-1899 Mary Tucker Magill was a Virginia educator and author whose work portrays the generation of Virginians who endured the hardships of defeat following the American Civil War (1861–1865) and looked ahead to the next century by embracing innovative ideas on health and well-being. Magill wrote two conservative textbooks on Virginia history and a forward-thinking manual of exercises for women. She was also a novelist and short-story writer whose fiction, like her historicism, depicted an idealized version of plantation life in the Old South.
Thu, 17 Dec 2009 09:53:06 EST]]> /Garnett_Richard_B_1817-1863 Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:05:42 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Garnett_Richard_B_1817-1863 Richard B. Garnett was a Confederate general in the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). The first to take over the Stonewall Brigade after the promotion of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, Garnett was well-regarded by his men but ran afoul of Jackson after the Battle of Kernstown (1862), when he ordered an unauthorized retreat. Jackson placed him under arrest and eventually ordered, but never completed, a court-martial. Robert E. Lee reassigned Garnett to the command of George E. Pickett's former brigade, and he spent much of the following year worried about his reputation and looking for opportunities to demonstrate his courage. He found one on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg (1863), when he died while helping to lead the doomed assault known as Pickett's Charge.
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 11:05:42 EST]]> /Dos_Passos_John_1896-1970 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:13:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Dos_Passos_John_1896-1970 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:13:17 EST]]> /Cather_Willa_1873-1947 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:48:41 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cather_Willa_1873-1947 Willa Cather was a Virginia-born modernist writer who is best known for O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), two novels about Nebraska, where she attended school and spent much of her childhood. Her re-creation of what is now the Midwest is rooted in her own family's experience moving west from the Shenandoah Valley in 1883, and her writing is preoccupied with the larger American experiment of uprooting and then re-establishing civilization. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel One of Ours, about a Nebraska farmer's son, but her settings are not limited to the Great Plains. Cather wrote memorably about New York City, where she worked as a writer and as managing editor for McClure's magazine. Her masterpiece, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), is set in both New Mexico and France. And her final novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), takes place around her native Winchester, Virginia. Sapphira is considered to be in part autobiographical—the novel's slave-owning family and their abolitionist daughter were all based on Cather's maternal relatives—and her writing required a return to Virginia near the end of her life.
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:48:41 EST]]> /Tucker_George_1775-1861 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:37:59 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Tucker_George_1775-1861 Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:37:59 EST]]> /Republican_Party_of_Virginia Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:18:47 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Republican_Party_of_Virginia Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:18:47 EST]]> /Loving_v_Virginia_1967 Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:32:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Loving_v_Virginia_1967 In the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down laws banning interracial marriages in the United States. At one time, as many as forty-one states had such prohibitions. Virginia's law had been passed in 1691 and, after being amended several times, reached its final version in the Racial Integrity Act, passed by the Virginia General Assembly on March 20, 1924. Although every state with such a law banned marriage between a white person and an African American, some laws, including Virginia's, went further and prohibited marriage between whites and other non-white ethnic groups such as Asians and Native Americans. Loving v. Virginia was a landmark case, both in the history of race relations in the United States and in the ongoing political and cultural dispute over the proper definition of marriage.
Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:32:35 EST]]> /Petersburg_During_the_Civil_War Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:30:50 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Petersburg_During_the_Civil_War Petersburg, located in south central Virginia, was the second-largest city in the state at the outset of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Originally sharing the conservative political stance of most business-oriented cities in the Upper South, Petersburg's white citizens eagerly embraced the Confederate cause after Virginia's Convention of 1861 voted to secede in April 1861. The city hosted a variety of Confederate installations, particularly hospitals, and served as headquarters for a number of Confederate military departments that bore responsibility for southern Virginia and eastern North Carolina. Petersburg experienced its first nearby combat in the spring of 1864 during the Bermuda Hundred Campaign and then became the focal point of the Petersburg Campaign between June 1864 and April 1865. The city capitulated to Union forces on April 3, 1865, initiating the Appomattox Campaign and just six days before Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House, ninety miles west of Petersburg.
Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:30:50 EST]]> /Chaloner_John_Armstrong_1862-1935 Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:25:23 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chaloner_John_Armstrong_1862-1935 John Armstrong Chaloner was a celebrity and writer known for coining the catchphrase "Who's looney now?" after his personal trials with psychiatric experimentation and treatment. When his wealthy family learned that he believed he possessed a new sense, which he called the "X-Faculty," they had him committed to a psychiatric hospital in New York in 1897; a court later declared him insane and ruled he be permanently institutionalized. He escaped the institution and was ultimately deemed sane more than twenty years later. In the meantime, he published about two dozen books on his experiments with psychotherapy and his stay in the insane asylum. His books, such as The Lunacy Law of the World (1906), often attacked the rising power of psychiatric medicine, and his case was controversial particularly among the nation's leading psychologists, who disagreed about whether he was rational or paranoid. He married and divorced the novelist Amélie Rives, but lived near her Albemarle County home for much of his life.
Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:25:23 EST]]> /Sapphira_and_the_Slave_Girl_1940 Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:04:09 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Sapphira_and_the_Slave_Girl_1940 Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) is the last novel by Willa Cather and the Virginia-born writer's only book set entirely in the state. Based on an incident in Cather's own family, in which her maternal grandmother helped a slave escape in 1856, the novel details the complicated marriage of Henry and Sapphira Colbert, who operate a mill and small farm in Back Creek outside Winchester in the years before the American Civil War. Sapphira wrongly suspects that one of her slaves, Nancy, is in an intimate relationship with her husband, and manipulates those around her to exact revenge. Henry and the couple's daughter, Rachel, intervene by helping Nancy flee to Canada. At the time of its release, Sapphira and the Slave Girl was praised by the New York Times for examining "the question of slavery without any portentous fanfare," but in the years since, the book has not been widely read. Most critics have charged Sapphira with being racist and overly nostalgic, while a few have defended it as a brilliant inversion of old stereotypes and a coded exploration of sexual desire.
Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:04:09 EST]]> /JaffAC._Louis_I_ca_1888-1950 Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:54:41 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/JaffAC._Louis_I_ca_1888-1950 Louis I. Jaffé was the longtime editor of the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot (1919–1950) who earned renown for his sponsorship and promotion of Virginia's antilynching law. A lifelong liberal and civil rights activist, Jaffé championed reforms that sought to improve the daily lives of African Americans, especially those in Hampton Roads. In 1929, he became Virginia's first Pulitzer Prize winner, receiving the award for Distinguished Editorial Writing for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot's antilynching advocacy.
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:54:41 EST]]> /Hale_Nancy_1908-1988 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:44:56 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hale_Nancy_1908-1988 Nancy Hale was a prolific author of short stories, novels, nonfiction, plays, and memoirs. A regionalist writer who excelled at describing life in New England, New York City, and finally Virginia, she is best known for her third novel, The Prodigal Women (1942), which chronicles the lives of three young women in Boston, New York City, and a small Virginia town. An astute observer of everyday people, Hale frequently used female protagonists because, she said, they "puzzled" her.
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 13:44:56 EST]]> /Woman_Suffrage_in_Virginia Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:23:08 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Woman_Suffrage_in_Virginia The woman suffrage movement, which sought voting rights for women, began in Virginia as early as 1870. In 1909, its most vocal supporters organized around the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, which joined with national groups in an effort to change state and local laws and pass an amendment to the United States Constitution. The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was passed in Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states a year later. Virginia, however, delayed its ratification until 1952. By then, women had been voting and, slowly, winning elected office in the state for more than 30 years.
Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:23:08 EST]]> /Byrd_Organization Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:56:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Byrd_Organization The Byrd Organization was a state political machine headed by Harry F. Byrd (1887–1966), a Democratic state senator, governor, and United States senator who, for more than forty years, used his power and influence to dominate the political life of Virginia. Inheriting an already tight party organization that for decades had emphasized small government and a limited franchise, Byrd prioritized fiscal conservatism—a policy he pithily dubbed "pay as you go"—and, on those grounds, opposed many of fellow Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal programs. Byrd and his organization are perhaps best known, however, for their fierce opposition to a 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that mandated the desegregation of public schools. The resulting Massive Resistance movement led to the shutdown of schools in Charlottesville, Front Royal, and Norfolk before the federal and state courts overturned state antidesegregation policies. It also effectively ended the organization's decades-long hold on power in the state.
Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:56:28 EST]]> /Muse_Benjamin_1898-1986 Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:49:47 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Muse_Benjamin_1898-1986 Benjamin Muse, a journalist based in Manassas, Virginia, emerged as one of the state's most prominent white liberals during the period of the Massive Resistance movement, which opposed the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision outlawing segregation in public schools, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Through a weekly column in the Washington Post, Muse criticized what he perceived to be the undemocratic practices of the Byrd Organization, the Virginia political machine led by U.S. senator and former governor Harry F. Byrd Sr., a Democrat. Muse also charged that Massive Resistance represented a desperate gamble by rural leaders to preserve the state's one-party system. Throughout the five-year crisis, Muse insisted that Virginia must comply with the Supreme Court's ruling, and he championed the efforts of white moderates and liberals from the cities and suburbs who opposed the state's plan, which amounted to abandoning public education rather than accepting any degree of racial integration. In 1959, after federal and state courts invalidated Virginia's school-closing scheme, Muse became the director of the Southern Leadership Project in order to spread the message of compliance with Brown to other states across the region.
Fri, 23 Oct 2009 14:49:47 EST]]> /Johnston_Mary_1870-1936 Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:41:25 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Johnston_Mary_1870-1936 Mary Johnston was a novelist, historian, playwright, suffragist, and social advocate, as well as the first woman to top best-seller lists in the twentieth century. Her second and most famous novel, To Have and to Hold (1900), broke existing publishing records by selling 60,000 copies in advance and more than 135,000 copies during its first week of publication. A romantic tale of colonial Virginia, the book proved to be the biggest popular success between the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852 and Gone With the Wind in 1936. A pair of early motion pictures dramatized the book. Two other novels, Audrey (1902) and Sir Mortimer (1904), were also commercial successes, although Johnston's popularity waned later in her career. In fact, Johnston's social activism may be of more lasting importance than her literary output. She was an early member of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, she depicted the horrors of lynching in her 1923 story "Nemesis," and she supported a number of other reformist causes. Her reputation as a writer, however, has been partially restored in recent years.
Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:41:25 EST]]> /Grant_Ulysses_S_1822-1885 Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:58:43 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Grant_Ulysses_S_1822-1885 Ulysses S. Grant rose from command of an Illinois regiment to general-in-chief of all Union armies during the American Civil War (1861–1865), and served as the eighteenth president of the United States (1869–1877). Victor at important battles in the western theater, Grant arrived in Virginia in March 1864 as a newly minted lieutenant general and the military leader of all Union forces. He took the field with the Army of the Potomac rather than running the war from a desk in Washington, D.C., and provided de facto direction of that army from May 1864 until April 1865. Grant's stature as the preeminent Union general catapulted him into the White House for two terms, and his legacy, though still debated, remains that of the soldier who won the war for the Union.
Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:58:43 EST]]> /Magruder_Julia_1854-1907 Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:54:46 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Magruder_Julia_1854-1907 Julia Magruder was the author of sixteen novels, many short stories, and a number of essays on social issues. In her writings throughout her life, she often defended the South against outside criticism. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, she lived most of her life in Washington, D.C., but traveled widely in Europe and had a vast circle of friends that included her cousin, Helen Magruder, who became Lady Abinger of Inverlochy Castle, Scotland; and the Virginia novelist Amélie Rives. Magruder's novels, mostly written for young female readers seeking marriage and romance, usually follow a heroine who must overcome slight obstacles to marry her true love.
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:54:46 EST]]> /Hoffman_William_1925-2009 Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:43:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Hoffman_William_1925-2009 William Hoffman was the author of fourteen novels, four short-story collections, and two plays. His terrifying experience as a combat medic in Europe during World War II (1939–1945) dominated his earliest writing, including The Trumpet Unblown (1955) and Yancey's War (1966), which, according to poet George Garrett, are "at the highest rank of the American fiction coming out of World War II." Hoffman is also celebrated for novels that combine character-driven portraits of the South with action-mystery plots, and writing that joins tragic intensity with humor. Tales of murders and mysterious runaways—Tidewater Blood (1999) and Wild Thorn (2002), for instance—are fueled by Hoffman's sense of the macabre, while the backwoods of Virginia and his home state of West Virginia provide local color. Booklist has praised the writer's "evocative sense of place," but the Washington Post, in reviewing Lies (2005), wondered if Hoffman's prose hadn't become "swamped" in southern stereotypes.
Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:43:35 EST]]> /Davis_Jefferson_1808-1889 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:35:18 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Davis_Jefferson_1808-1889 Jefferson Davis was a celebrated veteran of the Mexican War (1846–1848), a U.S. senator from Mississippi (1847–1851; 1857–1861), secretary of war under U.S. president Franklin Pierce (1853–1857), and the only president of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Tall, lean, and formal, Davis was considered to be an ideal leader of the Confederacy upon his election in 1861, despite the fact that he neither sought the job nor particularly wanted it. Davis was a war hero, slaveholder, and longtime advocate of states' rights who nevertheless was not viewed to be a radical "fire-eater," making him more appealing to the hesitating moderates in Virginia. Still, Davis's reputation suffered over the years. Searing headaches, caused in part by facial neuralgia, exacerbated an already prickly personality. "I have an infirmity of which I am heartily ashamed," he said. "When I am aroused in a matter, I lose control of my feelings and become personal." The challenges inherent in holding together a wartime government founded on the idea of states' rights didn't help, either, nor did critics like E. A. Pollard, editor of the Richmond Examiner, who charged after the war that the Lost Cause was "lost by the perfidy of Jefferson Davis." Robert E. Lee, however, spoke for many when he said, "You can always say that few people could have done better than Mr. Davis. I knew of none that could have done as well."
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:35:18 EST]]> /Chancellorsville_Campaign Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:30:30 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Chancellorsville_Campaign The Chancellorsville Campaign, which culminated in the Battle of Chancellorsville, fought May 1–6, 1863, produced one of the most stunning and ambivalent Confederate victories of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Confederate general Robert E. Lee had trounced the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg the previous December, but since then, Joseph Hooker had thoroughly reorganized and revitalized his dispirited Union troops. Declaring that he had created "the finest Army on the Planet," he set into motion an elaborate plan designed to quietly turn the left flank of the outnumbered and underfed Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, which was camped not far from Fredericksburg. In the face of Hooker's attack, Lee dangerously divided his army, sending Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson through the Wilderness, a wild and tangled woodland, and around Hooker's right side in what became one of the most famous flanking maneuvers of the war. A combination of bad Union generalship and good Confederate luck forced Hooker to retreat across the Rappahannock River. Jackson was accidentally killed by his own men in the fighting, and while his death may have been devastating for the Confederacy, so were the additional 13,459 casualties. Combined with the shocking losses at Gettysburg two months later, they nearly destroyed the army's offensive capabilities.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:30:30 EST]]> /Ewell_Richard_S_1817-1872 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:25:44 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ewell_Richard_S_1817-1872 Richard S. Ewell was a Confederate lieutenant general during the American Civil War (1861–1865) who apprenticed under Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862, and later took charge of the Army of Northern Virginia's Second Corps after Jackson's death. Nicknamed "Old Bald Head" and said to be "blisteringly profane," Ewell courted controversy with his decision not to attack Cemetery Hill on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg (1863). Some historians have claimed that Ewell's inaction in this episode cost the Confederates the battle, although Robert E. Lee's orders on the matter were vague and it is unclear whether Ewell's men could have carried the day in any case.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:25:44 EST]]> /Cross_Keys_Battle_of Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:15:32 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cross_Keys_Battle_of The Battle of Cross Keys, while not a full-fledged battle, was, nevertheless, an important Confederate strategic victory that came near the end of Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson's Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862 during the American Civil War (1861–1865). On June 8, 1862, three Confederate brigades under the command of Richard S. Ewell held off a much larger Union force under John C. Frémont in order that they might then unite with the rest of Jackson's army seven miles to the southeast at Port Republic. There on the following day, Jackson successfully attacked another Union force under James Shields, marking the end of what had been a remarkable campaign. After initial setbacks in western Virginia, Jackson had temporarily secured the valley for the Confederacy, confused and demoralized the politicians in Washington, D.C., and freed himself to reinforce General Robert E. Lee ahead of the Seven Days' Battles in front of the Confederate capital at Richmond.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:15:32 EST]]> /Culp_s_Hill_and_Wesley_Culp_1839-1863 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:12:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Culp_s_Hill_and_Wesley_Culp_1839-1863 Culp's Hill is located about three-quarters of a mile south of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It forms the barb of a fishhook-shaped series of hills and ridges on which the fiercest fighting took place during the second and third days of the Battle of Gettysburg (1863) during the American Civil War (1861–1865). It was also near, if not on, Culp's Hill that Private John Wesley Culp of Company B, 2nd Virginia Infantry Regiment, Stonewall Brigade, was killed.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:12:17 EST]]> /Delany_Martin_R_1812-1885 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:10:04 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Delany_Martin_R_1812-1885 Martin R. Delany was an African American abolitionist, writer, editor, doctor, and politician. Born in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), he was the first black field officer in the United States Army, serving as a major during and after the American Civil War (1861–1865), and was among the first black nationalists. A fiercely independent thinker and wide-ranging writer, he coedited with Frederick Douglass the abolitionist newspaper North Star and later penned a manifesto calling for black emigration from the United States to Central America. He also authored Blake; Or, the Huts of America, a serial publication about a fugitive slave who, in the tradition of Nat Turner, organizes insurrection. In his later life, Delany was a judge and an unsuccessful candidate for lieutenant governor of South Carolina. Despite all this, he remains relatively unknown. "His was a magnificent life," W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1936, "and yet, how many of us have heard of him?" Historians have tended to pigeonhole Delany's contributions, emphasizing his more radical views (which were celebrated in the 1970s), while giving less attention to the extraordinary complexity of his career.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:10:04 EST]]> /Emory_and_Henry_College_During_the_Civil_War Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:04:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Emory_and_Henry_College_During_the_Civil_War Emory and Henry College, located in the town of Emory in Washington County, is the oldest college in southwestern Virginia and was attended by the future Confederate cavalry general J. E. B. Stuart. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the school was closed while many of its students fought in the Confederate army, and the Confederate government used its buildings to establish the Emory Confederate States Hospital. After the nearby Battle of Saltville in October 1864, wounded Union soldiers, including members of the 5th U.S. Colored Cavalry, were treated there. On the morning of October 3, Confederate soldiers reportedly killed several black troopers and their white lieutenant in what has come to be known as the "Saltville Massacre."
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:04:21 EST]]> /Ford_Antonia_1838-1871 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:58:29 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Ford_Antonia_1838-1871 Antonia Ford was a Confederate spy during the American Civil War (1861–1865), credited with providing the military information gathered from her Fairfax Court House home during the First Battle of Manassas (1861) and in the two years following. In October 1861, Confederate cavalry general J. E. B. Stuart issued an order declaring her an honorary aide-de-camp. The document was used against Ford in 1863, however, when she was accused of spying for John Singleton Mosby, whose partisan rangers famously captured the Union general Edwin H. Stoughton in his headquarters. Mosby later denied that Ford ever spied for him. After several months in prison, Ford was released and married one of her captors, Union major Joseph C. Willard. Ford stopped spying, Willard resigned from the army, and they returned to managing the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., and had three children.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:58:29 EST]]> /Floyd_John_B_1806-1863 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:55:46 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Floyd_John_B_1806-1863 John B. Floyd was governor of Virginia (1849–1852), secretary of war in the administration of United States president James Buchanan (1857–1860), and a Confederate general during the American Civil War (1861–1865). As governor, he helped usher in the apportionment and suffrage reforms proposed by the constitutional convention of 1850–1851, but at Buchanan's War Department his reputation plunged because of various corruption scandals. His good name would never recover. At Fort Donelson, Tennessee, in February 1862, he held off the forces of Union brigadier general Ulysses S. Grant for two days. Rather than personally surrender, however, he and his Virginia soldiers fled by steamboat in the middle of the night, leaving the duty to his third in command. Floyd was relieved of his command a month later.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:55:46 EST]]> /Burnside_Ambrose_E_1824-1881 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:53:14 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Burnside_Ambrose_E_1824-1881 Ambrose E. Burnside was a major general in the Union army during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Instantly recognizable for his bushy sideburns (the term itself is derived from reversing his last name), Burnside was one of four men to command the Army of the Potomac in Virginia. Offered the job twice previously—following George B. McClellan's failed Peninsula Campaign in 1862 and following the Second Battle of Manassas later that summer—he turned it down, citing his own lack of experience and encouraging his peers and, subsequently, historians to question his self-confidence. When he did take command of the army, he led it into disaster at the Battle of Fredericksburg (1862), perhaps the Union's most lopsided defeat of the war. After his corps was badly defeated at the Battle of the Crater (1864) he went home on a leave of absence from which he was never called back to duty. Burnside's dismal reputation is probably unfair, however. He was an innovative engineer but an unlucky general who was often made a scapegoat for larger failures.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:53:14 EST]]> /Fredericksburg_Battle_of Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:50:02 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Fredericksburg_Battle_of The Battle of Fredericksburg at the end of 1862 was perhaps the Confederacy's most lopsided victory of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Union Major General Ambrose E. Burnside, charged with aggressively pursuing and destroying General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, instead led his own Army of the Potomac to what was perhaps its greatest defeat. On December 13, Burnside sent six Union divisions across an open field against Lee's well-fortified line, causing such slaughter that Burnside wept openly at the outcome and Lee was inspired to utter his famous remark to his subordinates, "It is well that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it." The Fredericksburg defeat was one of the lowest points for Union fortunes in the war. Eight months later, when Confederates experienced a similar fate at Gettysburg, jubilant Union troops were heard to yell, "Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!"
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:50:02 EST]]> /Armistead_Lewis_A_1817-1863 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:43:50 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Armistead_Lewis_A_1817-1863 Lewis A. Armistead was a Confederate general in the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Decorated for bravery during the Mexican War (1846–1848), the West Point dropout and widower earned a reputation as a tough, soft-spoken, and highly respected leader at such battles as Seven Pines (1862), Antietam (1862), and Malvern Hill (1862), and was known to his friends, ironically, as "Lo," short for Lothario. At Gettysburg, on July 3, 1863, he helped to lead the frontal assault that came to be known as Pickett's Charge. When Armistead, at the head of his brigade, reached the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge that protected the Army of the Potomac's Second Corps, he was shot and wounded more than once. The Union troops who fired the fatal shots happened to be commanded by one of Armistead's closest friends, Winfield Scott Hancock. His death was immortalized in the 1993 film Gettysburg and has come to symbolize the Lost Cause-influenced "brother versus brother" view of the war so celebrated in American culture.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:43:50 EST]]> /Boyd_Belle_1844-1900 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:33:15 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Boyd_Belle_1844-1900 Belle Boyd was one of the most famous Confederate spies during the American Civil War (1861–1865), repeatedly and under dangerous circumstances managing to relay information on Union troop strengths and movements to Confederate commanders in the field. According to Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, the intelligence she provided helped the general to win victories in the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862. Authorities suspected her of being a spy almost from the start, and the Union imprisoned her multiple times, but Boyd was a master of manipulation. Her ability to exploit a soldier's sense of chivalry and the Victorian male's natural deference to "ladies" became legendary and may help explain why so many of the war's best spies were women. In 1864, she fled to London, England, where she married one of her captors and later penned a memoir, Belle Boyd in Camp and in Prison (1865), that detailed her exploits and attracted international attention.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:33:15 EST]]> /Fathers_The_1938 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:58:24 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Fathers_The_1938 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:58:24 EST]]> /Appomattox_Campaign Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:49:12 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Appomattox_Campaign Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:49:12 EST]]> /Gettysburg_Campaign Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:37:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Gettysburg_Campaign The Gettysburg Campaign, which culminated in the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), was the most ambitious offensive attempted by the Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861–1865). In June 1863, Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia invaded the North in hopes of relieving pressure on war-torn Virginia, defeating the Union Army of the Potomac on Northern soil, and striking a decisive blow to Northern morale. George G. Meade had commanded the Union army only three days when his advance columns collided unexpectedly with Confederates at the small town of Gettysburg in southeastern Pennsylvania. Fighting raged for three days, inflicted a combined 51,000 casualties, and climaxed on July 3 with the doomed Confederate frontal assault known as Pickett's Charge. After retreating across the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia was never again an offensive force, and Lee's aura of invincibility was shattered. Historians have long argued that this, along with the capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 4, was the war's turning point. It was also a turning point for how the war would be perceived by generations to come. In the immediate postwar years, Virginians in particular began a debate over generalship during the battle, often seeking to prop up heroes like Lee and to destroy supposed villains, such as Lee's South Carolina–born lieutenant, James Longstreet. These arguments formed the basis of the Lost Cause view of the war.
Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:37:03 EST]]> /Cox_Earnest_Sevier_1880-1966 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:57:29 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Cox_Earnest_Sevier_1880-1966 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:57:29 EST]]> /Sandy_T_O_1857-1919 Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:54:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Sandy_T_O_1857-1919 T. O. Sandy was Virginia's earliest agricultural extension agent. A farmer, scientist, and teacher, he opened the state's first extension office in Burkeville in 1907, serving the residents in surrounding counties with practical agricultural advice. In 1914, Virginia Polytechnic Institute (now Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg assumed the administration of the statewide program. Sandy, who had briefly attended Virginia Tech, coordinated Virginia's extension efforts until his retirement in 1917. During Sandy's tenure as extension agent, farming practices and attitudes toward scientific agriculture in Virginia significantly improved.
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:54:00 EST]]> /Poll_Tax Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:37:47 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Poll_Tax Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:37:47 EST]]> /Defenders_of_State_Sovereignty_and_Individual_Liberties Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:50:03 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Defenders_of_State_Sovereignty_and_Individual_Liberties Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:50:03 EST]]> /Dan_River_Mills Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:38:23 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Dan_River_Mills Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:38:23 EST]]> /Refugees_During_the_Civil_War Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:17:23 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Refugees_During_the_Civil_War Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:17:23 EST]]> /Petersburg_Campaign Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:50:57 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Petersburg_Campaign The Petersburg Campaign was one of the final campaigns in the eastern theater during the American Civil War (1861–1865). It began on June 15, 1864, with the sustained contest to control the city—Virginia's second largest and the supply center for the Confederate capital at Richmond—and concluded with its occupation by Union forces on April 3, 1865. The campaign included parallel actions north of the James River, east of Richmond, and was inextricably linked with simultaneous military actions elsewhere, most directly in the Shenandoah Valley. Union armies under Ulysses S. Grant failed to storm Petersburg from June 15 to 18 and on July 30, following the Battle of the Crater, in which a mine was exploded under the Confederate works. Southern forces led by Robert E. Lee, aided by an elaborate system of field fortifications that eventually stretched thirty-seven miles, fought on the strategic defensive, gradually surrendering the city's supply lines to a series of Grant's offensives. Grant at last shattered Lee's defenses on April 2, 1865, leading to the evacuation of Richmond and Petersburg that night. Within a week, Lee would surrender the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant at Appomattox Court House, ninety miles west of Petersburg, for all practical purposes ending the Civil War in Virginia.
Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:50:57 EST]]> /West_Virginia_Creation_of Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:40:08 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/West_Virginia_Creation_of Tue, 06 Oct 2009 10:40:08 EST]]> /Staunton_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:40:27 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Staunton_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:40:27 EST]]> /Freeman_Douglas_Southall_1886-1953 Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:25:13 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Freeman_Douglas_Southall_1886-1953 Douglas Southall Freeman was a biographer, a newspaper editor, a nationally renowned military analyst, and a pioneering radio broadcaster. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice: the first, in 1935, for his four-volume biography of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee; and the second, posthumously in 1958, for his six-volume biography of George Washington, with a seventh volume written by John Alexander Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth after Freeman's death in 1953. The son of a Confederate veteran, Freeman is best known as a historian of the American Civil War (1861–1865) and, in particular, of the high command of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. His description of Lee, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and their compatriots as "men of principles unimpeachable, of valour indescribable" for some has suggested that his work was influenced by the Lost Cause view of the war that was in part founded by his former neighbor, Jubal A. Early. In reality, Freeman's admiration for the Confederates never influenced his historical conclusions.
Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:25:13 EST]]> /Jamestown_Ter-Centennial_Exposition_of_1907 Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:56:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Jamestown_Ter-Centennial_Exposition_of_1907 The Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition, marking the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony by settlers from England, was held in Norfolk, Virginia, from April 26 to November 30, 1907. The event was one in a series of large fairs and expositions held across the United States, beginning with the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, which commemorated the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus's landing in America. Such events were designed as international showcases for arts and technology and were often linked to important anniversaries in order to highlight the notion of historical "progress." More than its predecessors, the Jamestown exhibition emphasized athletics and military prowess, the latter drawing some protests. Among many dignitaries who visited the exposition were U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, the author Mark Twain, the educator Booker T. Washington, representatives from more than twenty nations abroad, and a number of foreign naval ships. Although the exhibition on African Americans was considered to be particularly successful, the event in general was a financial fiasco, plagued by poor management, overly ambitious plans, insufficient resources, and tight deadlines. The naval display, however, was impressive enough that in 1917 the exposition's site became home to Naval Air Station Hampton Roads (later Naval Station Norfolk).
Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:56:21 EST]]> /Limber_Jim Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:59:22 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Limber_Jim "Jim Limber" or James Henry Brooks—his legal name and his life dates are uncertain—was a free, mixed-race child in the Confederate capital of Richmond during the American Civil War (1861–1865) who lived for slightly more than a year in the household of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Contemporary accounts suggest that he enjoyed an intimate relationship with the Davis family, leading some modern observers to make unverified claims that he was "adopted" and effectively became a member of the family. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the child has become a symbol of the Confederate first family's supposed liberality on racial issues.
Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:59:22 EST]]> /Family_Life_During_the_Civil_War Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:58:30 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Family_Life_During_the_Civil_War Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:58:30 EST]]> /Jenkins_Will_F_1896-1975 Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:19:30 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Jenkins_Will_F_1896-1975 Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:19:30 EST]]> /Kepone Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:41:23 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Kepone Kepone is a toxic, nonbiodegradable pesticide that a chemical company dumped into Virginia's James River from 1966 until 1975. The chemical's negative effect on the environment was documented and eventually publicized, leading authorities to shut down the Allied Chemical Corporation plant that produced Kepone and to order fishing bans and advisories. The environmental and medical scandal was one of the first of its kind to play out nationally, and while it eventually led to the destruction of the Virginia fishing industry, it also led to improved environmental awareness.
Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:41:23 EST]]> /Bryan_Joseph_III_1904-1993 Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:59:58 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Bryan_Joseph_III_1904-1993 Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:59:58 EST]]> /Jones_Suzanne_Whitmore_1950- Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:07:38 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Jones_Suzanne_Whitmore_1950- Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:07:38 EST]]> /Free_Blacks_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:42:55 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Free_Blacks_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:42:55 EST]]> /Spencer_Anne_1882-1975 Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:18:53 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Spencer_Anne_1882-1975 Anne Spencer was a poet, a civil rights activist, a teacher, a librarian, and a gardener. While fewer than thirty of her poems were published in her lifetime, she was an important figure of the black literary movement of the 1920s—the Harlem Renaissance—and only the second African American poet to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973). Noted for iambic verse preoccupied with biblical and mythological themes, Spencer found fans in such Harlem heavyweights as James Weldon Johnson, who commented on her "economy of phrase and compression of thought." In addition to her writing, Spencer helped to found the Lynchburg chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). She was also an avid gardener and hosted a salon at her Lynchburg garden, which she called Edankraal, attracting the major stars of the Harlem Renaissance. Her former residence is now a museum that is open to the public.
Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:18:53 EST]]> /Blackbird Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:43:43 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Blackbird Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:43:43 EST]]> /Pendleton_Alexander_S_1840-1864 Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:10:39 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Pendleton_Alexander_S_1840-1864 Alexander S. Pendleton was a Confederate staff officer in the Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War (1861–1865). Nicknamed Sandie, he was best known for his service under Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, who died following the Battle of Chancellorsville (1863), but he also served under Jackson's successors Richard S. Ewell and Jubal A. Early. Henry Kyd Douglas, a fellow member of Jackson's staff, called him "the most brilliant staff officer in the Army of Northern Virginia and the most popular with officers and men."
Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:10:39 EST]]> /Weldon_Railroad_Battle_of_the Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:39:37 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Weldon_Railroad_Battle_of_the The Battle of the Weldon Railroad (or Globe Tavern) was fought August 18–21, 1864, and provided the key element of Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant's fourth offensive during the Petersburg Campaign of the American Civil War (1861–1865). This Union victory resulted in the permanent capture of one of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's most important supply lines. On August 18, the Union Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac seized a portion of the vital railroad that connected Petersburg with Wilmington, North Carolina, at a point three miles south of Petersburg. A determined Confederate counterattack the following day battered but did not break the Union troops' hold on the tracks, and a second Confederate assault on August 21 failed miserably.
Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:39:37 EST]]> /Shenandoah Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:04:41 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Shenandoah Wed, 17 Jun 2009 13:04:41 EST]]> /Wreck_of_the_Old_97 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:44:27 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Wreck_of_the_Old_97 The wreck of the Old 97 occurred on September 27, 1903, when the Southern Railway freight train called the Fast Mail (or "Old 97") left the tracks and crashed at the Stillhouse Trestle outside Danville, Virginia, killing eleven people. The accident became a sensation, with thousands of spectators at the scene, newspaper stories, and even a series of musical ballads, the most popular of which became a hit on the country music charts in 1924.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:44:27 EST]]> /Woodson_Carter_G_1875-1950 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:44:06 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Woodson_Carter_G_1875-1950 Carter G. Woodson was a historian and founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, the Journal of Negro History, and "Negro History Week." Now known as the "Father of Black History" because of his efforts to promote African American history, Woodson wrote pioneering social histories chronicling the lives of black people at a time when mainstream white scholars denied that African Americans were worthy of historical study. Much of his work was based on public records, letters, speeches, folklore, and autobiographies, materials that were previously ignored. Woodson also used an interdisciplinary approach that combined anthropology, sociology, and history. From 1915 until 1947, he published four monographs, five textbooks, five edited collections of documents, five sociological studies, and thirteen articles. He pioneered in interpretations of slavery and Africa, which were adopted by mainstream historical scholars late in the 1950s. Among the works for which he is best known is The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933), which is still in print seventy-five years later.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:44:06 EST]]> /Women_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:43:50 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Women_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:43:50 EST]]> /Winchester_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:42:21 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Winchester_During_the_Civil_War Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:42:21 EST]]> /Wilson_Woodrow_1856-1924 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:42:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Wilson_Woodrow_1856-1924 Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University (1902–1910), governor of New Jersey (1911–1913), twenty-eighth president of the United States (1913–1921), and creator of the League of Nations. Although he was sometimes caricatured as a northern academic, Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, and considered himself to be southern. As such, he was the first southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor in 1848, and brought to the office a progressive zeal for reform, both economic and social, as well as the typical mindset of the southern white political class, which considered African Americans second-class citizens, that contributed to his decision strictly to segregate the federal workforce. He is perhaps best known for leading the United States into the World War I (1914–1918), despite an election vow to do otherwise, and for helping to negotiate the resulting Treaty of Versailles. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:42:00 EST]]> /William_and_Mary_Review Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:41:45 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/William_and_Mary_Review Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:41:45 EST]]> /Wilder_Lawrence_Douglas_1931- Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:40:28 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Wilder_Lawrence_Douglas_1931- L. Douglas Wilder was governor of Virginia from 1990 until 1994. His was a political career of many firsts: the grandson of slaves, he was the first African American elected governor of any state in America. He was the first black member of the Virginia Senate in the twentieth century. And he was the first African American to win statewide office in Virginia when he was elected lieutenant governor in 1985. A Democrat, he ran briefly for United States president in 1991 and in 2004 was elected mayor of Richmond, serving until 2008.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:40:28 EST]]> /Washington_Booker_T_1856-1915 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:39:00 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Washington_Booker_T_1856-1915 Booker T. Washington was an author, educator, orator, philanthropist, and, from 1895 until his death in 1915, the United States' most famous African American. The tiny school he founded in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881 is now Tuskegee University, an institution that currently enrolls more than 3,000 students. The most famous of the several books he authored, coauthored, or edited during his lifetime, Up from Slavery (1901), has become a classic of American autobiography, drawing comparisons not only to earlier slave narratives but also to such texts as The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:39:00 EST]]> /Virginia_s_State_Parks Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:38:25 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_s_State_Parks Virginia's state parks system was launched on June 15, 1936, when the six inaugural parks opened simultaneously. The creation of those parks was made possible through one of U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs, the goal of which was to create jobs to help pull the country out of the Great Depression. The success of those first six parks in providing citizens with recreational opportunities and preserving Virginia's natural areas led to an expansion to thirty-four state parks established in Virginia in 2008.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:38:25 EST]]> /Virginia_Writers_Project Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:37:52 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Virginia_Writers_Project The Virginia Writers Project was formed in 1935 as part of the Works Progress Administration, a federal program designed to combat the Great Depression. With a staff of approximately forty Virginia teachers, writers, librarians, clerks, and other professionals, the VWP interviewed thousands of Virginians from all walks of life about their lives, work, and memories. In addition, VWP interviewers collected and checked information about the geography and history of Virginia, a process that resulted in two important books: the 700-page Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion (1940) and The Negro in Virginia (1940), which included oral histories from Virginians who had lived through slavery and the American Civil War (1861–1865). The VWP shut down in 1943, but its material was archived—much of it at the Library of Virginia—where it continues to be useful to those interested in primary resources about Virginia's past.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:37:52 EST]]> /Vanauken_Sheldon_1914-1996 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:37:02 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Vanauken_Sheldon_1914-1996 Sheldon Vanauken was a poet and novelist best known for his memoir A Severe Mercy (1977), about converting to Christianity and his wife's unexpected death at age forty. A less famous sequel, Under the Mercy, was published, to less acclaim, in 1985.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:37:02 EST]]> /Valentine_Lila_Meade_1865-1921 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:35:20 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Valentine_Lila_Meade_1865-1921 Lila Meade Valentine was a suffragist, education reformer, and public-health advocate. During her abbreviated life, she played a vital role in creating and running organizations that improved the health-care and public school systems of her native city of Richmond. Valentine also became an ardent supporter of woman suffrage early in the 1900s, cofounding the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia and serving as an active member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. A talented organizer and an eloquent speaker, Valentine led efforts on behalf of suffrage that came to fruition in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, giving women the right to vote.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:35:20 EST]]> /Twenty-Slave_Law Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:33:43 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Twenty-Slave_Law Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:33:43 EST]]> /Tucker_St_George_1752-1827 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:33:17 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Tucker_St_George_1752-1827 St. George Tucker was one of the most influential jurists and legal scholars in the United States late in the 1700s and early in the 1800s. Tucker served as judge on three different courts in Virginia: the General Court (1788–1804), the Virginia Court of Appeals (1804–1811), and the federal district court for the eastern district of Virginia (1813–1825). In addition to his work as a jurist, Tucker was an important legal scholar and educator. From 1788 until 1804, between court terms, Tucker taught law at the College of William and Mary. Perhaps Tucker's most significant contribution was his 1803 publication of a five-volume edition Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone. Tucker's "American Blackstone," the first major treatise on American law, helped shape a generation of lawyers and judges.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:33:17 EST]]> /Trigiani_Adriana Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:32:57 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Trigiani_Adriana Adriana Trigiani is an award-winning author, playwright, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker. She is perhaps best known for her novels, beginning with Big Stone Gap (2000), the first in a series of stories set in the Appalachian region of southwestern Virginia. The stories are told from the perspective of a lovable character whose wry wit reflects the author's own. Her writing has been described as "heartwarming without being saccharine," and by New York Times reviewer Andrea Higbie "as comfortable as a mug of chamomile tea on a rainy Sunday." Her professional career began in 1985, when she wrote Secrets of the Lava Lamp for the Manhattan Theatre Club. In the succeeding decades, she has distinguished herself as an author, scriptwriter, director, and producer for both television and film.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:32:57 EST]]> /Tiernan_Mary_Spear_1836-1891 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:32:39 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Tiernan_Mary_Spear_1836-1891 Mary Spear Tiernan was a novelist, essayist, and occasional poet who wrote primarily about central Virginia before and during the American Civil War (1861–1865). She published three novels, as well as short stories, which appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, Century Magazine, and the Southern Review, among others. Her fiction vividly depicted wartime Richmond , and her novel Homoselle (1881) was based on a Virginia slave revolt and can be distinguished for Tiernan's remarkable sympathy for African Americans.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:32:39 EST]]> /Thompson_Ida_Mae_1866_x2013_1947 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:31:25 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Thompson_Ida_Mae_1866_x2013_1947 Ida Mae Thompson was an important figure in Virginia's woman suffrage movement, not for her political work but for her recordkeeping. First as a member of the Equal Suffrage League, the organization that led the effort to win women the right to vote, and then as a member of the League of Women Voters, Thompson collected and preserved the movement's history.
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:31:25 EST]]> /Taylor_Peter_1917-1994 Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:30:35 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Taylor_Peter_1917-1994 Peter Taylor was a short-story writer and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Summons to Memphis (1986). During a writing career that spanned six decades, much of which was spent in Charlottesville, he established himself as a master of short fiction, displaying elegance and lucidity of style in examining family life in the New South. Many early stories were published in the New Yorker, and after joining the faculty at the University of Virginia in 1967, Taylor experienced a mid-life second flowering and produced the fiction for which he is best remembered. In 1978, he was awarded the Gold Medal for the Short Story by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wider public notice followed, although it may still have been true, as he proclaimed himself, that he was "the best-known unknown writer in America."
Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:30:35 EST]]> /Taylor_Eleanor_Ross_1920- Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:29:52 EST http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Taylor_Eleanor_Ross_1920- Eleanor Ross Taylor is a poet, short-fiction author, and literary critic. An award-winning writer, she was born in North Carolina but has spent the last several decades working and publishing from her homes in Gainesville, Florida, and Charlottesville, Virginia. Widow of the noted short-fiction author and novelist Peter Taylor (1917–1994), Taylor is associated with a literary circle that includes