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Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust in 2009.

The Bleak, All But-Forgotten World of Segregated Virginia

Former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust’s extraordinary memoir recalls painful memories for her--and me.
by Garrett Epps via Washington Monthly on November 8, 2023
An ad for a runaway slave in the Virginia Gazette, describing Thomas Greenwich, an "East-India Indian."
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“Of the East India Breed …”

The first South Asians in British North America.
by Brinda Charry via HNN on May 7, 2023
1825 painting of a white man kissing a Black woman, and a white man whipping a Black man.

Jefferson’s Secret Plan to Whiten Virginia

Jefferson’s system depended on shoring up the bulwarks of race and basing the law on a theory of government that withdrew protection from unfavored groups.
by Timothy Messer-Kruse via Commonplace on April 19, 2023
A vintage public school textbook on the history of Virginia.
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The Virginia History its State Board Doesn’t Want Students to Know

Our racial history is complex and important, but debates today are eliding entire chapters of it.
by Kevin M. Levin via Made By History on August 25, 2022
Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma, at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, 1924

The Chilling Persistence of Eugenics

Elizabeth Catte’s new book traces a shameful history and its legacy today.
by Chris Lehmann via The New Republic on April 20, 2021

Race, History, and Memories of a Virginia Girlhood

A historian looks back at the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in her home state.
by Drew Gilpin Faust via The Atlantic on July 18, 2019

The Birthplace of American Slavery Debated Abolishing it After Nat Turner’s Bloody Revolt

Virginia engaged in “the most public, focused, and sustained discussion of slavery and emancipation that ever occurred."
by Gregory S. Schneider via Retropolis on June 1, 2019

White Nationalists Held a Race Rally in Charlottesville. The Location Was No Coincidence.

The region was at the epicenter of eugenic policy-making in the first half of the 20th century.
by Frederick Coye Heard via Scalawag on August 13, 2018
Voters casting ballots in 2008.

How Letting Felons Vote Is Changing Virginia

Governor McAuliffe has embarked on a campaign to grant clemency more often, and to restore the civil rights of convicted felons.
by Vann R. Newkirk II via The Atlantic on January 8, 2018
Map of lynchings in Virginia

Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia

An ongoing research project telling the stories of all the known lynching victims who were killed in Virginia between 1866 and 1932.
by Gianluca de Fazio via James Madison University on January 1, 2018
Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: A Vote for Cutting Off Your Nose

To reduce Virginia’s use of the death penalty, Thomas Jefferson proposed using permanent disfigurement as a punishment for rape, polygamy, and sodomy.
by Matthew Wills, Emily Cock via JSTOR Daily on June 4, 2025
Allyson Gray strolls through Dragon Run, Virginia.

The Hidden Story of Native Tribes Who Outsmarted Bacon’s Rebellion

A scene of conflict that was lost to the ages has been unearthed, assembling an indigenous perspective on events at the very root of America’s founding.
by Gregory S. Schneider via Washington Post on September 20, 2024
White men strapping a Black man into an electric chair.
original

Matters of Life and Death

Systemic racism and capital punishment have long been intertwined in Virginia, the South, and the nation.
by Janis Parker on July 10, 2024
Map of the Chesapeake Bay.

Our Local Monster

Whose knowledge matters in a changing region?
by Kathryn Carpenter via Contingent on May 19, 2024
Tobias Menzies (right) as Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in "Manhunt."

The Real History Behind Apple TV+'s 'Manhunt' and the Search for Abraham Lincoln's Killer

A new series dramatizes Edwin Stanton's hunt for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators in the aftermath of the president’s 1865 assassination.
by Vanessa Armstrong via Smithsonian on March 14, 2024
Collage of African Americans' faces.

Specters of the Mythic South

How plantation fiction fixed ghost stories to Black Americans.
by Alena Pirok via Southern Cultures on January 24, 2024
A topographical map from the 1850s showing Alexander's Island as an entity in the Potomac

A Cartographer’s Lament: The D.C. - Virginia Boundary That Wouldn't Stay Put

Was this Virginia? No one was quite sure.
by Jane Winik Sartwell via Boundary Stones on April 21, 2023
A painting of the American Founders at the Constitutional Convention.

Inventing American Constitutionalism

On "Power and Liberty," a condensed version of Gordon Wood's entire sweep of scholarship about constitutionalism.
by Gordon S. Wood, Brian A. Smith via Law & Liberty on March 10, 2023
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R).
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Two Opposing Approaches To Public Health May Be on the Ballot in 2024

Governors Ron DeSantis and Gretchen Whitmer took opposite approaches to covid in swing states — but each sailed to reelection.
by Andrew Wehrman via Made By History on December 5, 2022
Roscoe Lewis sets up to record an interview of formerly enslaved people in Petersburg, Va., as part of the Federal Writers’ Project. (Hampton University Archives)

How Researchers Preserved the Oral Histories of Formerly Enslaved Virginians

In the 1930s, the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed 300 formerly enslaved Virginians to share their oral histories.
by David A. Taylor via Washington Post Magazine on July 19, 2022
English painting of Pocahontas by Simon van de Passe.

The Moment That Changed Colonial-Indigenous Relations Forever

How a massacre on March 22, 1622 irrevocably shaped relations between Indigenous Americans and English colonists.
by Peter C. Mancall via TIME on March 22, 2022
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West Virginia's Founding Politicians Understood Democracy Better than Today's

They believed that wealth should have no bearing on a citizen’s voting power.
by Daniel W. Sunshine via HNN on October 17, 2021
The “Martinsville Seven,” a group of seven Black men executed in Virginia, 1951.

A Virginia the Martinsville Seven Could Not Have Imagined

Governor Ralph Northam pardoned seven young Black men put to death in 1951— a step forward in addressing Virginia's imperfect criminal justice system.
by Bob Lewis via Virginia Mercury on September 7, 2021
Artistic photo of John Marshall

America’s ‘Great Chief Justice’ Was an Unrepentant Slaveholder

John Marshall not only owned people; he owned many of them, and aggressively bought them when he could.
by Paul Finkelman via The Atlantic on June 15, 2021
Bacon's Rebellion, 1676-1677

Bacon's Rebellion: My Pitch

A drama about an interracial uprising in colonial Virginia.
by William Hogeland via Hogeland's Bad History on June 15, 2021
Photograph of Robert E. Lee standing alone in front of a door.

The Mystery of Robert E. Lee

He prized self-control above all, but did not always achieve it.
by Allen C. Guelzo via National Review on September 17, 2020

Beyond Speeches and Leaders

The role of Black churches in the Reconstruction of the United States.
by Nicole Myers Turner via Muster on August 14, 2020
A history textbook open to a chapter called "How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery," with an illustration of a wealthy white man shaking the hand of a smiling enslaved African American man whose well-dressed family looks on while white laborers work.

The Lies Our Textbooks Told My Generation of Virginians About Slavery

State leaders went to great lengths to instill their gauzy version of the Lost Cause in young minds.
by Bennett Minton via Washington Post on July 31, 2020

UVA and the History of Race: The George Rogers Clark Statue and Native Americans

Unlike the statues of Lee and Jackson, these Charlottesville monuments had less to do with memory than they did with an imagined past.
by Christian McMillen via UVA Today on July 27, 2020
A Continental Army soldier's shirt and a detail from a painting depicting a soldier wearing such a shirt.

“Natives of the Woods of America”

Hunting shirts, backcountry culture, and “playing Indian” in the American Revolution.
by Marta Olmos via The Junto on July 14, 2020
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