VMHC Lectures

All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s by J. Harvie Wilkinson III

Duration: (01:10:23)

On March 29, 2017, Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s.”

All Falling Faiths is a personal memoir of growing up and coming of age in the 1950s and 60s. Much of it describes my boyhood and adolescence in Richmond during those two decades and what life was like, both good and bad, back then. Only a personal journey can help us recognize both the mistakes and accomplishments of our youth and the need for future generations to find the common ground that too often eluded us back then. Each chapter in my book discusses a different fallen faith. My own view is that the 1960s inflicted enormous damage on America –- damage that helps to explain the terribly torn and fractured country that we have today. Those who take a positive view of the 1960s, however, have strong points to make as well; that decade helped make us a country for all Americans, not just some. My hope in this book is that those who rend a garment may yet help to mend it. By understanding all we lost in the 1960s, we may yet find a brighter way.

J. Harvie Wilkinson III is a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. President Reagan appointed him to that court in August of 1984, and he was the Fourth Circuit’s chief judge from 1996–2003. He is the author of several books, including Harry Byrd and the Changing Face of Virginia Politics 1945–1966; One Nation Indivisible: How Ethnic Separatism Threatens America; Cosmic Constitutional Theory: Why Americans Are Losing Their Inalienable Right to Self-Governance; and, most recently, All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s. Judge Wilkinson lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. He and his wife Lossie have two children, Nelson and Porter.

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 March 16, 2017, Brent Tarter delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia.” A Saga of the New South treats the political and legal controversies Virginia’s antebellum public debt created in post–Civil War Virginia. The debt controversy fundamentally altered the political landscape of Virginia twice. It created the conditions under which the Readjuster Party, a biracial coalition of radical reformers, seized control of the state government in 1879; then it gave rise to a counterrevolution that led the elitist Democratic Party to eighty years of dominance over the state’s politics and government. The Readjusters successfully refinanced the public debt and increased spending for the new public school system, but the debt controversy generated a long train of legal disputes. Through an in-depth analysis of the political and legal controversies about public debt, race, and education, A Saga of the New South sheds new light on the many obstacles reformers faced in Virginia and elsewhere in the South during the decades after the Civil War.

Brent Tarter is a founding editor of the Library of Virginia’s Dictionary of Virginia Biography and a cofounder of the annual Virginia Forum. He is the author of several books, including The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia, Daydreams and Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and War, and A Saga of the New South: Race, Law, and Public Debt in Virginia.

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 March 2, 2017, Marcia Zug delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Lonely Colonist Seeks Wife: Rediscovering the History of America’s First Mail-Order Brides.”

Today, mail-order brides are usually assumed to be desperate and exploited women. However, the history of the Jamestown mail-order brides casts doubt on this belief. Life in the early American colonies was difficult, but one of the biggest threats was actually the absence of marriageable women. As a result, marital immigration was seen as crucial to the Virginia colony’s success. Potential female immigrants were wooed with numerous financial and legal incentives and these benefits made mail-order marriage an attractive option for some seventeenth century women. Interestingly, modern mail-order marriages may not be so different. Four centuries later, many things have changed, but mail-order marriages continue to offer women the possibility of a better future.

Marcia Zug is an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Buying a Bride: An Engaging History of Mail-Order Marriage.

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 9, 2017, Nancy E. Sheppard delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Airship ROMA: A Forgotten Tragedy.”

In March 1921, Maj. John G. Thornell and his crew were detailed to Italy to procure a new experimental airship for the U.S. Army Air Service. Stationed at Langley Field in Hampton, the ROMA never lived up to expectations despite being heralded as the future of military innovation. Tragically, it crashed on February 21, 1922, in Norfolk, Virginia, claiming the lives of most of the men aboard. Author Nancy E. Sheppard will reveal details and never before published imagery of the forgotten tragedy of one of the last great airships and those who sacrificed for the promise of a new era in aviation.

Nancy E. Sheppard, a writer and historian of her native Hampton Roads, Virginia, is the author of The Airship ROMA Disaster in Hampton Roads.

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, 2017, Beverly Louise Brown delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons, A New Book by the Award-Winning Historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor,” celebrating the publication of her late sister’s book.

Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its DemonsIn this eye-opening book, Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons, Elizabeth Brown Pryor examines six striking and mostly unknown encounters that Abraham Lincoln had with his constituents. It is a collection of intriguing stories about a man who himself prized story-telling, and taken together they reveal his character and opinions in unexpected ways, illustrating his difficulties in managing a republic and creating a presidency. We observe him standing gracelessly mute at his first review of the U.S. Army on the eve of the Civil War. Later we find him swearing profusely at a young solider on the White House portico. He alternately pontificates or talks pigeon English to Native American chiefs, and he simply avoids most interactions with prominent women. In the last days of the war we find Lincoln visiting Richmond, where he meets an old Confederate with a menacing stick in his hand named Duff Green, who challenges his plans for the reconstruction of the nation. What this book shows most clearly is that greatness was not simply laid on Lincoln’s shoulders like a mantle but was won in fits and starts. Elizabeth Brown Pryor was tragically killed in Richmond in April 2015, just after completing the manuscript of Six Encounters with Lincoln. Her sister Beverly Louise Brown, a noted art historian, saw the book through publication and will talk about her sister, the book, and the perils and delights in finishing another author’s work. This lecture will celebrate the book’s publication by Viking in February 2017.

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 January 18, 2017, Walter S. Griggs, Jr. delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Historic Disasters of Richmond.”

Richmond has had its share of man-made and natural calamities throughout its illustrious history. In 1811, fire destroyed the Richmond Theatre on Broad Street, tragically claiming seventy-two lives in one of the worst urban disasters in American history. As Union forces approached Richmond in the final months of the Civil War, Confederate troops ignited the city in flames, leaving scars still visible today. The international Spanish flu epidemic did not spare the city in the early twentieth century. The worst airplane crash in Virginia history occurred near Byrd Airport in 1961. Local author Walter S. Griggs, Jr., tells these stories and more as he traces the harrowing history of Richmond’s most famous disasters.

Dr. Walter Griggs Jr. is an emeritus professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has written numerous books on a variety of historical subjects, including The Collapse of Richmond’s Church Hill Tunnel; The Hidden History of Richmond; World War II in Richmond, Virginia; and Historic Disasters of Richmond.

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 January 5, 2017, at noon, Peter Onuf delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “The Private Jefferson: 'Most Blessed of the Patriarchs.'”

"Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Tracing Jefferson's philosophical development from youth to old age, historian Peter Onuf explores what he calls the "empire" of Jefferson's imagination—an expansive state of mind born of his origins in a slave society, his intellectual influences, and the vaulting ambition that propelled him into public life as a modern avatar of the Enlightenment who, at the same time, likened himself to a figure of old—"the most blessed of the patriarchs." Indeed, Jefferson saw himself as a "patriarch," not just to his country and mountain-like home at Monticello but also to his family, the white half that he loved so publicly, as well as to the black side that he claimed to love, a contradiction of extraordinary historical magnitude.

Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Professor of History Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar at Monticello, is the author of “The State of the World: Thomas Jefferson’s Political Vision,” in the exhibition catalogue, The Private Jefferson: Perspectives from the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the coauthor with Annette Gordon-Reed of “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. He is also a co-host (the “18th Century Guy”) of the popular public radio program and podcast BackStory with the American History Guys.

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 10, 2016, Susan R. Stein delivered a Banner Lecture called “Documents and Drawings: 'The Private Jefferson' Examined.”

Thomas Jefferson devoted himself to building the new American nation as well as Monticello, his plantation home. At Monticello, he managed his sizable farms, designed the house and its surrounding landscape, and selected art and furnishings. This talk will discuss how the extensive Coolidge Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society has influenced the understanding of Jefferson and the ongoing restoration and interpretation of Monticello. The key drawings and records of The Private Jefferson exhibition—from Jefferson’s first elevation of Monticello, the Declaration of Independence, and catalog of books to his designs for curtains and a plow—demonstrate the range of his actions and interests.

Susan R. Stein, the Richard Gilder Senior Curator and Vice President of Museum Programs at Monticello, is the author of The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (1993). She has been involved in the presentation and interpretation of Jefferson and Monticello since 1986.

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 8, 2016, Elaine Frantz Parsons delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Horns, Masks, and Women's Dress: How the First Klan Used Costume to Build Domestic Terrorism.”

One hundred and fifty years ago, the Ku-Klux Klan became the first broad-based domestic terrorist movement in the United States. Although there was nothing new about white violence against black southerners, the Ku-Klux Klan reworked violence in a way that would fit a modern post-slavery nation. It sought to disempower and control rural blacks not only directly through violence but also by using bizarre costume and performance to create a climate of terror that could be spread both by word of mouth and through the powerful national newspaper network. Most “Ku-Klux” did not wear white uniforms like the Klan of the 1920s. Their varied costumes featured animal horns, fake facial hair, polka dots and reflective metals, blackface, and, often, women’s dress. Those who made and wore these costumes intended to define a new basis of southern white authority and to force freedpeople and their allies to acknowledge it.

Elaine Frantz Parsons is an associate professor of history at Duquesne University and the author of Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States and Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction.

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 1, 2016, Robert M. S. McDonald delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Thomas Jefferson, Revered and Reviled.”

Of all the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson stood out as the most controversial and confounding. Loved and hated, revered and reviled, during his lifetime he served as a lightning rod for dispute. Few major figures in American history provoked such a polarization of public opinion. While Jefferson’s supporters organized festivals in his honor where they praised him in speeches and songs, his detractors portrayed him as a dilettante and demagogue, double-faced and dangerously radical, an atheist hostile to Christianity. Characterizing his beliefs as un-American, they tarred him with the extremism of the French Revolution. Yet his allies cheered his contributions to the American Revolution, unmasking him as the now formerly anonymous author of the words that had helped to define America in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s bifurcated image took shape both as a product of his own creation and in response to factors beyond his control. In the first fifty years of independence, Americans’ views of Jefferson revealed much about their conflicting views of the purpose and promise of America.

Robert M. S. McDonald is a professor of history at the United States Military Academy. He is the author and editor of several books on Jefferson, including Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West Point (2004), Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge (2012), and Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time (2016).

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