Before Greta Thunberg, before Emma González, before Malala Yousafzai, there was Barbara Johns. Johns kickstarted America’s student-led movement for civil rights in education in 1951, when she launched a walkout of her fellow students at the all-Black Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville. She was sixteen at the time. She planned the walkout to […]
We’ve just published our entry on Mary Richards Bowser. Born into slavery, Bowser played an important role in the pro-Union spy ring that Elizabeth Van Lew ran in Richmond during the American Civil War. Lois Leveen, the author of the entry, has unearthed a tremendous amount of new information on Bowser—but it is likely that more documents related to Mary Richards Bowser […]
IMAGE: Jason E. Powell, Looking Into the Past: Loudoun County Courthouse, Leesburg, VA It’s been a busy week here at Encyclopedia Virginia: we’re working on a terrific project that will make our site even more classroom-friendly. As we wind down for the weekend, check out our favorite links from this week: This Washington Post article focuses on […]
There were plenty of great links to explore on the web this week; here are a few that caught our eye: Why is there no modern edition of Robert E. Lee’s papers? Glenn W. LaFantasie discusses the Lees’ hold on the family papers in “The Confederate We Still Don’t Know.” If you’re in need of […]
Friday afternoon is here, and with it, EV’s weekly wrap-up. As you make your weekend plans, take a look at our favorite links from around the web this week: Is news coverage of the debt crisis giving you a headache? Yeah, me, too. But in this podcast, our friends at BackStory offer a clear, concise, and even […]
Happy Friday! As you brainstorm ways to keep cool this weekend, check out this list of links that caught our eyes this week: Out of the Box, the blog of the archivists at the Library of Virginia, showcases a series of beautiful and bizarre commercial letterheads they unearthed from the LVa’s various collections. The Civil […]
Witchcraft was a genuine concern for colonial Virginians. The colony’s English settlers brought with them a strong belief in the devil’s power and his presence in the New World. This belief was first manifested in the Jamestown colonists’ early perceptions of the Virginia Indians, whom they believed to be devil worshippers. After 1622, some colonists began to accuse one another of practicing witchcraft. Though witchcraft cases in Virginia were less common and the sentences less severe than the more famous witch trials of Salem, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, evidence exists that about two dozen such trials took place in Virginia between 1626 and 1730. They ranged from civil defamation suits to criminal accusations. The most famous of these was the trial of Grace Sherwood of Princess Anne County, in which the judges determined her guilt by administering a water test. Records indicate that the last witchcraft trial in the mainland colonies took place in Virginia in 1730; five years later, Parliament repealed the Witchcraft Act of 1604, the statute under which British American colonists prosecuted accused witches. Since then, witchcraft has been largely forgotten as an aspect of life in colonial Virginia.
