As we celebrate Black History Month, it’s a good time to remember Carter G. Woodson, who is known as the Father of Black history and who in 1926 created the forerunner of Black History Month—Negro History Week.
At the time, the idea that African Americans might have a history worth preserving and studying was radical. Read more about: Remembering the Father of Black History
Each year the staff at Encyclopedia Virginia waits with bated breath to learn our top 10 entries of the year. This year holds some surprises, with four new entries breaking into the list of our most-read entries of the year and our long-time leading entry on Indentured Servants in Colonial Virginia falling to number four. Read more about: The Top 10 of 2023
As amazing as it seems for an area that was once home to numerous Native tribes that were part of Tsenacomoco, the Powhatan paramount chiefdom that stretched from the James to the Potomac rivers and west to the fall line, a new Virginia state park in the region is the first to honor Indigenous history in the Commonwealth. Read more about: A “Special Meeting Place” Focuses on Indigenous History
Chances are if you’re thinking about witches this Halloween when a shadow scuttles across the moon or a black cat crosses your path, you’re picturing a woman accused of casting spells or associating with the Devil in the frosty woods of New England. The accused witches of Salem, in what was then the Province of Massachusettes Bay, are the country’s most famous purported practitioners of the dark arts, but Virginia had its own experiences with witchcraft trials. Read more about: Witches of Virginia
Encyclopedia Virginia’s September fundraising campaign is underway to raise $10,000 to support free, public access to Virginia history.
While we’ve been fortunate and grateful to receive financial support from a variety of sources throughout our history, projects like ours thrive with reader support. When readers contribute, we can create nuanced, relevant content that helps students, journalists, educators, and everyday citizens understand Virginia’s history and culture. Read more about: Support Encyclopedia Virginia
A recent Washington Post investigation revealed the extent of the “racial brain collection” amassed by Ales Hrdlicka, the curator of the division of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum, which was a forerunner of the National Museum of Natural History.
Hrdlicka was primarily responsible for gathering some 250 human brains in the early decades of the twentieth century from a network of scientists, physicians, and professors, all in service of proving the biological superiority of white people. Read more about: The “Racial Brain” Collector and the Dark History of Eugenics
In a recent Washington Post article about the Artemis project, which aims to establish a long-term human presence on the South Pole of the Moon, NASA’s Prasun Desai likened the astronauts to “the settlers who came to Jamestown” and “lived off the land.”
While it’s tempting to think of Jamestown as a proto-Artemis full of intrepid settlers, that was far from the reality, as our entry on the Early Jamestown Settlement makes clear. Read more about: The Myth of “Living Off the Land” at Jamestown
In recognition of Juneteenth, the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund announced $3.8 million in new grants to preserve forty African American history sites, including four in Virginia, that reflect Black activism, achievement, and resilience to tell a more complete American story.
The Cape Charles Rosenwald School, constructed in 1929, is a rare example of a brick, four-teacher Rosenwald school. Read more about: Honoring Black Spaces for Juneteenth
The efforts of Colonial Williamsburg to, in the words of the New York Times, get the past “right” continue to make news. As we noted recently in the EV Blog, Colonial Williamsburg moved the building that housed the Bray School for enslaved and free Black children to a more prominent location in an effort to center the stories of the non-white people who contributed to the colonial community. Read more about: Getting the Past “Right”
Is history set in stone, like a statue, or is it fluid, more evolving process than petrified facts? At EV, we get to see history in motion, as with our entry on the Bray Schools. These schools were founded in Williamsburg and Fredericksburg, as well as in Philadelphia, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island, by the Associates of Dr. Read more about: History on the Move
In this report, dated May 1864, the Committee on Colored Refugees, who were representatives of the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends, gives its assessment of the needs of the formerly enslaved people escaping behind Union lines and how Quaker charity efforts were meeting them in contraband camps across Virginia, including Alexandria. One of their agents, Harriet Jacobs, wrote her own letter documenting what she saw in Alexandria and Washington, D.C. For Quakers, the abolition of slavery was a moral and religious imperative.
In this letter, dated July 5, 1884, Sarah Stewart, an enslaved domestic at Montpelier, writes to her enslaver, Dolley Madison, reporting that the Orange County sheriff had seized many of the people enslaved by the Madisons to pay their debts. Stewart implores Madison to ask her neighbors to purchase those enslaved people who had been seized to prevent their being permanently separated from their families by slave traders taking part in the domestic slave trade. Ultimately, the enslaved community at Montpelier was largely broken up because of Madison’s financial difficulty.
This article, published in the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator on December 21, 1855, gives an account of the New York state militia mistaking Thomas Downing for a white man of the same name who was trying to escape militia duty, which was required of male citizens between the ages of 18 and 45. At this time, Downing was famous across New York City for his restaurant, community organizing, and activism. The story originally appeared in the New York Evening Post.
This is a published version of the speech that Governor Mills Edwin Godwin Jr. gave in January 1968 proposing that the General Assembly revise the state’s constitution and submit a new document to the voters for ratification. Rather than summoning a constitutional convention, he argued that the legislators should authorize him to appoint a Commission on Constitutional Revision, who would revise the constitution. In November 1970, voters ratified the new constitution.
In this article, published December 7, 1963, in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, Evelyn Butts states her reasons for filing suit against Governor Albertis S. Harrison Jr. and three Norfolk city employees: the unconstitutionality of the poll tax. Her case was combined with another case under the name Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, and on March 24, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the poll tax was unconstitutional. In 1962, as Congress debated the Twenty-Fourth Amendment banning poll taxes in federal elections, Governor Harrison reaffirmed his support for the poll tax in Virginia’s state and local elections.
Walter Plecker, Virginia’s registrar of vital statistics, compiled this list of the surnames of families he believed were Black and misidentifying themselves as white or Indian to distribute to public health personnel. This was part of Plecker and the state’s attempts to eliminate documentary records of Virginia Indians’ existence. These actions are known as the Paper Genocide and affected tribal communities’ efforts for federal recognition into the twenty-first century.
Between 1791 and 1804, the Haitian Revolution transformed Saint-Domingue from a slaveholding French colony into the free Black nation of Haiti. The Haitian Revolution sent shockwaves across the world and had a profound impact on people and politics in Virginia. Thousands of people, free and enslaved, arrived in Virginia from revolutionary Saint-Domingue. For free and enslaved Black Virginians, the revolution served as a model of a revolution that was predicated on Black liberation. Most white Virginians viewed the Haitian Revolution with horror, sympathizing with French enslavers and expressing fear that the revolution might inspire similar uprisings in Virginia. Over the next decade, conspiracies including the Secret Keeper Plot and Gabriel’s Conspiracy were alleged to have either been inspired by the Haitian Revolution or to have had direct French and Haitian involvement. These fears influenced not only white Virginian attitudes toward people from revolutionary Saint-Domingue but also affected national and foreign policy. Decades after the revolution, its memory continued to shape how Virginians understood slave revolt and abolition.
The American Revolution was an important but inconclusive moment in American educational history. Revolutionary republicanism provided an initial impulse for tax-supported, widespread public education, including in Virginia, where Thomas Jefferson proposed a plan for public education. Countervailing ideological trends, and a limited embrace of universal human equality, kept republican ideas about education from coming to fruition in the early republic, especially in the South. Still, gains were made toward universal public education. New England made primary education accessible to most children, and private academies increasingly served the needs of middling students, including girls and young women. In the North, institutions such as the New York African Free School expanded educational opportunities for free African Americans, while in Virginia, education for Black people was slowly criminalized. Jefferson realized his plan to create a free institution of higher education in the University of Virginia, but a system of widespread public education would have to wait until after the American Civil War (1861–1865).
At the outset of the American Revolution (1775–1783), the thirteen colonies faced Great Britain without an army or a navy. While a Continental Army was soon created, the question of building and outfitting a navy plagued the Continental Congress. Finally, a Continental fleet was given the green light and American naval ships slowly took to the seas. During the course of the war, the Continental Navy outfitted about sixty-five vessels. This small fighting force faced the greatest sea power of the eighteenth century, in addition to the challenges of weather, scarcity of supplies, dearth of manpower, and enemy privateers. Engagements between the Continental Navy and His Majesty’s Royal Navy along the shores and waters of Virginia were few. Yet the Continental Navy fought the enemy in the waters of Europe and the Caribbean, harassing the British and drawing their attention away from colonial ports. The size of the American fleet never came close to the might of the Royal Navy, however, and the hopes held at the time of its creation faded as the war raged on. By the time the final shots of the Revolution rang out, the Continental Navy was on its last legs, numbering only five ships, and would soon disappear completely.
Robert Mush (sometimes Mursh) was a member of the Pamunkey Indian Tribe who fought as a Patriot in the Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Mush was born around 1758 and attended the Brafferton Indian School at the College of William and Mary beginning in 1769. He enlisted in the Continental Army in 1776 and fought at the Battle of Brandywine (September 11, 1777) and the Battle of Germantown (October 4, 1777). In 1778, he marched south to Charleston, South Carolina, for the siege of that city, where he was captured by the British and spent time as a prisoner of war before being exchanged. He remained in the army and served under General Anthony Wayne in Georgia until the war ended in 1783. Mush subsequently returned to the Pamunkey Indian Reservation in King William County, where he married a woman named Elizabeth and served as a tribal leader. Mush became involved with the Baptist Church, and by 1800 he had moved his family to South Carolina, where he served as a minister among the Catawba Indian Tribe and later at the Flint Hill Baptist Church until his death on December 7, 1837. Following his death, Elizabeth Mush petitioned to receive the pension afforded to the widows of Revolutionary War veterans, and her claim file provides a rare glimpse into the life of an Indigenous Revolutionary War veteran.
William Fitzhugh of Chatham was a wealthy Virginia planter, politician, and civic leader, descended from one of the colony’s earliest and most prominent families. He was born on September 4, 1741, in King George County, the only son of Henry Fitzhugh and Lucy Carter Fitzhugh, daughter of Robert “King” Carter. His father died when he was an infant, and a childhood accident left him blind in one eye. Educated at home under tutors, Fitzhugh inherited vast estates—including Eagle’s Nest, Somerset, and extensive lands in Fairfax County—making him one of the richest men in Virginia. In 1763 he married Ann Randolph, a cousin of Thomas Jefferson. The couple later built the grand Georgian mansion Chatham, overlooking Fredericksburg, which became famous for its hospitality. More than 100 enslaved people worked the plantation, cultivating crops and practicing skilled trades. Fitzhugh was also a noted horse breeder and racer, corresponding with both Jefferson and George Washington about horses. A supporter of the Patriot cause, Fitzhugh represented King George County in the House of Burgesses (1772–75), attended the Virginia Conventions of 1775 and 1776, and held numerous posts during and after the Revolution—including delegate to the Continental Congress (1779), member of the House of Delegates (1776–1777, 1780–1781, 1787–1788), and state senator (1780–85). After the war, Fitzhugh continued in public life, serving as a presidential elector in 1789. The financial burden of entertaining guests at Chatham eventually led him to relocate to Fairfax County and Alexandria. In 1805, an uprising by enslaved men at Chatham ended violently, reflecting widespread white fears following Gabriel’s Rebellion. Fitzhugh sold Chatham the following year. During his later years, Fitzhugh remained active in civic affairs. Fitzhugh died on December 19, 1809, and was buried at Ravensworth.
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