Encyclopedia Virginia said goodbye to our longtime media editor extraordinaire Donna Lucey at the end of July. Donna’s contributions to our mission of telling a more complete and inclusive story of Virginia have been many. Whether it was working with the American Civil War Museum to photograph never-before-digitized artifacts, organizing a listening session with Black female genealogists that led to new EV entries, or uncovering fascinating visual ephemera hidden in the deep recesses of dusty archives, Donna consistently found fascinating and often overlooked material and then wrote concisely and insightfully about those discoveries. Read more about: Saying Goodbye
Author: Peter McCormack Hedlund
Tackling the Roots of Racism in Virginia
Working on an encyclopedia day in and day out for more than a decade is rewarding and sometimes depressing. It’s rewarding to think that—if you are doing your job responsibly—the resource you are helping to create may contribute to an open and honest dialogue about the past and how that past informs the present. Read more about: Tackling the Roots of Racism in Virginia
Fuzzy Times and Time Lines
Most but not all entries in Encyclopedia Virginia have a time line. (This one, for instance, does not.) At first, a time line seems like a simple thing; it takes a subject and reduces it to days, months, and years, succinctly outlining the life of a poet, or a governor, or a civil-rights activist. Read more about: Fuzzy Times and Time Lines