On March 7, 2024, biographer Rebecca Boggs Roberts provided an unflinching look at First Lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson.

While this nation has yet to elect its first female president—and though history has downplayed her role—just over a century ago a woman became the nation’s first acting president. In fact, she was born in 1872, and her name was Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. She climbed her way out of Appalachian poverty and into the highest echelons of American power and in 1919 effectively acted as the first female president of the United States when her husband, Woodrow Wilson, was incapacitated. Beautiful, brilliant, charismatic, catty, and calculating, she was a complicated figure whose personal quest for influence reshaped the position of First Lady into one of political prominence forever. Rebecca Boggs Roberts offered an unflinching look at the woman whose ascent mirrors that of many powerful American women before and since, one full of the compromises and complicities women have undertaken throughout time in order to find security for themselves and make their mark on history.

Rebecca Boggs Roberts is an award-winning educator, author, and speaker, and a leading historian of American women’s suffrage and civic participation. She is currently deputy director of events at the Library of Congress and serves on the board of the National Archives Foundation, on the Council of Advisors of the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation, and on the Editorial Advisory Committee of the White House Historical Association. Her books include the award-winning The Suffragist Playbook: Your Guide to Changing the World; Suffragists in Washington, D.C.: The 1913 Parade and the Fight for the Vote; and Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On February 22, 2024, historians Cassandra Good and Carolyn Eastman presented a lecture on the Washington family, celebrity, and the development of the new United States.

While it’s widely known that George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, few are aware that they raised children together. In Good's book First Family, we see Washington as a father figure and are introduced to the children he helped raise, tracing their complicated roles in American history. The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye, well-known as George Washington’s family and keepers of his legacy. By turns petty and powerful, glamorous and cruel, the Custises used Washington as a means to enhance their own power and status. As enslavers committed to the American empire, the Custis family embodied the failures of the American experiment that finally exploded into civil war—all the while being celebrities in a soap opera of their own making.

Cassandra Good is a writer and historian focused on gender and politics in early America who currently serves as Associate Professor of History at Marymount University. She is the author of the prize-winning Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic and her newest book, First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America. Carolyn Eastman is an historian of early America with special interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century histories of political culture, the media, and gender. She is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author most recently of the award-winning The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On February 8, 2024, historian Marvin T. Chiles discussed the subject of his new book The Struggle to Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond.

Much is known about the City of Richmond’s troubled past with race and race relations. Richmond was one of the largest entrepot for the transatlantic slave trade, the capital of the Confederacy, a foundational city for Jim Crow segregation, the sacred home of Confederate memorialization, and the hotbed of Massive Resistance to school desegregation. Less talked about, however, is that Richmond was a national leader in racial reconciliation efforts after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Residents, business leaders, and public history organizations spent the last three decades of the twentieth century seeking to fix Richmond’s economy and public history scene to overcome its reputation and reality of racial strife, a conundrum created by the city’s troubled history. Yet, Richmond’s reconciliation movement unintendedly exacerbated the vestiges of past discrimination, that being racial gaps in wealth building, housing stability, and educational achievement. This lecture, based on The Struggle for Change, implores Richmonders and those interested in urban affairs, race relations, and southern history to not see current racial disparities as a continuum of past discrimination. Rather, Richmond’s recent history shows that progressive actions and actors exacerbated systemic issues through making positive changes in their city, the South, and nation.

Dr. Marvin T. Chiles is the Assistant Professor of African American History at Old Dominion University. The Struggle for Change is his first book. He has also published several articles, including “A Period of Misunderstanding: Reforming Jim Crow in Richmond, Virginia, 1930–1954,” which won the William M. E. Rachal Award from the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in 2021.

On January 11, 2024, historian John Reeves gave a lecture on the rise of Ulysses S. Grant during an extraordinary decade.

Captain Ulysses S. Grant, an obscure army officer who resigned his commission in 1854, rose to become general-in-chief of the United States Army in 1864. What accounts for this astonishing turn-around? Was it destiny? Or was he just an ordinary man, opportunistically benefiting from the turmoil of the Civil War to advance to the highest military rank? Grant’s life story is an almost inconceivable tale of redemption within the context of his fraught relationships with his antislavery father and his slaveholding wife. His connection to the institution of slavery, before and during the war, will be reconsidered in this talk.

John Reeves has been a teacher, editor, and writer for more than thirty years. The Civil War, in particular, has been his passion since he first read Bruce Catton’s The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War as an elementary school student in the 1960s. He is the author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case against an American Icon, A Fire in the Wilderness: The First Battle Between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession, and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On December 14, 2023, historian John Ragosta gave a lecture on Patrick Henry’s final political battles.

In a democracy, how do you disagree with government policy? What is a loyal opposition? In the 1790s, hyper-partisan political battles threatened to tear the new nation apart. Under the Sedition Act, a person criticizing the government could be jailed; opposition newspaper editors were targeted. In response, the Kentucky Resolutions, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, declared that Kentucky could proclaim federal laws unconstitutional and “nullify” them—secession, state versus state, and against the federal government, loomed. Newspapers warned of “Civil War!” George Washington begged Patrick Henry to come out of retirement, oppose these dangerous policies, and save the union. Though Henry had been the leading antifederalist, arguing against ratification of the Constitution, in 1799, he rebuked Jefferson and insisted that since “we the people” adopted the Constitution—even though Henry had opposed it—anyone contesting federal policy must seek reform “in a constitutional way.” Henry helped to define a loyal opposition. Unfortunately, that story was suppressed by Jeffersonians throughout the 19th century. John Ragosta discussed this story—recounted in For the People, For the Country: Patrick Henry’s Final Political Battle—a story of how a democracy must work if it is to survive.

John A. Ragosta is a historian at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. He is the author of Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed and For the People, For the Country: Patrick Henry’s Final Political Battle.

This program, part of the VMHC's multi-year initiative to commemorate the 250th Anniversary of the U.S., is presented by the John Marshall Center for Constitutional History & Civics.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On November 30, 2023, historian Jessica Taylor discussed the subject of her new book, Plain Paths and Dividing Lines: Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake.

It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. This talk follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who, in pursuit of freedom or profit, crossed emerging boundaries—fortifications, law, property lines—surrounding developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and others beyond the region by canoe and road for centuries. Their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland planters erected fences, policed unfree laborers and Native neighbors, and dispatched land surveyors. Using Native trade routes and places, and sometimes with the help of Native people themselves, escaping indentured and enslaved people absconded fueled by their own developing, alternate ideas about freedom and connection. Taylor talks about how Native land provided the perfect setting for early resistance to colonialism, and about exciting new efforts to document their escapades.

Dr. Jessica Taylor is an assistant professor in the history department at Virginia Tech. As a public historian, she collaborates on projects across the Southeast as diverse as oral histories with boatbuilders, augmented reality tours of historic sites, and reconstructed maps of precolonial landscapes. Her current work connects graduate and undergraduate students to history firsthand through fieldwork experiences in oral history, and an ongoing project documenting escape attempts of indentured servants and enslaved people in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. She is the author of Plain Paths and Dividing Lines: Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On October 24, 2023, Maj. Gen. Jason Q. Bohm, USMC, gave a lecture on the formation of the Marine Corps and its role in the American Revolution.

The fighting prowess of united states marines is second to none, but few know of the Corps’ humble beginnings and what it achieved during the early years of the American Revolution. Jason Bohm rectifies this oversight with his eye-opening Washington’s Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775–1777. Bohm artfully tells the story of the creation of the Continental Marines and the men who led them during the parallel paths followed by the Army and Marines in the opening years of the war and through the early successes and failures at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Canada, Boston, Charleston, and more. Washington’s Marines is the first complete study of its kind to weave the men, strategy, performance, and personalities of the Corps’ formative early years into a single compelling account.

Maj. Gen. Jason Q. Bohm is a Marine with more than 30 years of service. An infantryman by trade, he has commanded at every level from platoon commander to commanding general in peacetime and war. Bohm also served in several key staff positions, including as a strategic planner with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School, House Director, Marine Corps Office of Legislative Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, and Chief of Staff of U.S. Naval Striking and Support Forces, NATO. Bohm has a bachelor’s degree in marketing, a master’s degree in military studies, and a master’s degree in national security studies. Jason has written several articles for the Marine Corps Gazette and won various writing awards from the Marine Corps Association. He is the author of From the Cold War to ISIL: One Marine’s Journey and Washington’s Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775–1777.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On November 8, 2023, award-winning author Edward Ayers delivered a lecture about his book, "American Visions: The United States, 1800–1860."

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest.

Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. Ayers turns his distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.

Edward Ayers is university professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. He has received the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes for his scholarship, been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and was the founding board chair of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond. He is executive director of New American History and Bunk, dedicated to making the nation’s history more visible and useful for a broad range of audiences.

This lecture was co-hosted by American Civil War Museum, Black HIstory Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia, and The Valentine.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On September 21, 2023, Viola Franziska Müller gave a virtual-only lecture about her book, Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South. Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and, particularly discussed in this lecture, Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. Though all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migrants, runaway slaves who sought refuge in the urban South were antebellum America's undocumented people, forging lives free from bondage but without the legal status of freedpeople. Spanning from the 1810s to the start of the Civil War, Müller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved Black people in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities. Viola Franziska Müller is a historian at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at University of Bonn, Germany. She received her PhD from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 2020. Studying the history of U.S. slavery and free people of African descent in Europe, she is particularly interested in the legacies of slavery and the trajectories of racism. She is the author of Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On September 14, 2023, Greg May discussed his eye-opening new book, A Madman's Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom, about a sensational antebellum Virginia will that freed almost 400 people from slavery. John Randolph of Roanoke—one of Virginia’s best-known statesmen—was a relentless defender of the slave states’ rights, so his deathbed declaration that he wanted to free the people he enslaved took nearly everyone by surprise. But it soon emerged that Randolph had left inconsistently written wills. His lifetime of eccentric behavior gave his heirs ample room to claim that none of Randolph’s wills was valid because he had been mad. The resulting litigation took twelve years. It gives us vivid insights into the intimate lives of antebellum Virginians and a wholly unexpected look at how Virginia’s courts dealt with questions concerning slavery. Although the courts ultimately upheld the will that freed Randolph’s slaves, the story does not have a happy ending. Virginia law required the new freedmen to leave the state, and before they could settle 3000 acres purchased for them in western Ohio, a mob of angry white farmers drove them away. Gregory May is a historian who writes about the early American republic. He graduated from William and Mary and Harvard Law School, clerked for Justice Powell on the United States Supreme Court, and then practiced law for thirty years. He is the author of Jefferson’s Treasure, a political biography of Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.