It’s that time of year, and whether you’re sharpening your pencils and gathering your notebooks or a lifelong learner, Encyclopedia Virginia is here to support all your educational endeavors. It’s the place where anyone curious about Virginia’s past can access trustworthy history—free of charge.
This back-to-school season, we’re asking you to support EV at a particularly important moment. Read more about: Back to School with EV
In a tumultuous season of revolutionary fervor, a Virginian took up a quill and parchment and committed words to paper that would echo across the thirteen North American British colonies and down through time, becoming one of the most imitated constitutional documents in American history.
It declared that all men are equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, among them life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Read more about: The Declaration Before The Declaration
The American Revolution evokes many images—tricorne hats and fife-and-drum corps, famous battles like Saratoga and Yorktown, the Declaration of Independence and its contradictions. One thing that doesn’t spring to mind so readily is simmering class conflict. However, as our new entry on Tenant Revolts in Virginia during the American Revolution makes clear, critical battles were being fought off the battlefield, forcing us to rethink the parameters of the Revolution. Read more about: The Class Tensions Simmering Beneath the Revolution
One of the best aspects of working on our new section on the American Revolution in Virginia is the opportunity to learn about lesser-known events that reflect the complexity of freedom stories in the Commonwealth during the Revolutionary period. One of these overlooked stories is the Great Willoughby Slave Escape, as detailed in our new entry by Ervin L. Read more about: The Great Willoughby Slave Escape
If you’re an American, you probably have a clear mental image of what George Washington looked like. But this was not the case at the beginning of the American Revolution. Few people had ever seen Washington’s likeness. Over the course of his service as commander and chief of the Continental Army and President of the United States, this changed, as George Washington evolved from a member of the Virginia elite and Patriot leader to an American icon. Read more about: Portraits of George
Four years ago, we were asking what tales people would tell about the Great I-95 Snowstorm of ’22? About the time an untold number of people, including a U.S. senator, spent a frigid, worrisome twenty-four hours on the interstate somewhere between Ruther Glen in Caroline County and Exit 152/Dumfries in Prince William County after a tractor-trailer accident in an unexpectedly heavy snowstorm snarled traffic for fifty miles. Read more about: Cox’s Snow and the Persistence of Weather Memory
You’ve watched “The American Revolution” series on PBS, but it left you wanting more information on how the Revolution played out in Virginia—from the unique factors that ignited revolution in Virginia to the fascinating cast of Virginians who helped create a new nation. Encyclopedia Virginia has you covered.
Our new e-book, The Early Revolution in Virginia, curates EV’s entries on the pre-Revolutionary conflicts and the first years of the Revolution into one portable resource compatible with all popular e-readers. Read more about: Exclusive, Free e-Book: The Early Revolution in Virginia
The featured image in our recent entry about enslaved Patriot naval pilot Cesar Tarrant isn’t a portrait of Tarrant—at least as far as we know. It’s a striking portrait of an unidentified Black sailor, perhaps activist Paul Cuffe, painted around 1800 and held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Read more about: Forgeries, Fakes, Oh My!
Alfreda Marion Peel of Salem was among the most intrepid of the roving folklorists who scoured the Appalachians on behalf of the Virginia Folklore Society in the early twentieth century, collecting old ballads from England and Scotland. In 1917, she transcribed “Barbara Allen” as sung by Texas Gladden, who would go on to regional fame as a folk singer. Read more about: The Witch in the Mill and other Appalachian Haunts
The American Revolution was revolutionary in more ways than one. Beyond creating the United States and securing its independence from Britain, the Revolution inspired republican ideals that reverberated long after the guns had gone silent. Access to tax-supported, widespread public education was one such ideal, although as our new entry by Mark Boonshoft of the Virginia Military Institute on Education in Virginia in the Revolutionary Era shows, it would take some time to get there. Read more about: The Revolutionary Fervor for Public Education
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