VMHC Lectures

On November 10, 2016, Patrick H. Breen delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Revolt and Repression: Reconsidering the Nat Turner Slave Revolt.”

On August 21, 1831, seven men launched what would come to be known as the Nat Turner Revolt. The rebels swept through Southampton Country recruiting slaves to their rank and killing nearly five dozen whites, more than had ever been killed in any slave revolt in history of the United States. Within two days, whites reestablished control over Southampton County. Examining the terrible choices faced by slaves and also the deep disagreements among whites about how to respond to the rebels, this lecture will discuss new ways of thinking about Nat Turner, his revolt, Southampton County, and even American slavery itself.

Patrick H. Breen is the author of The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. He is an associate professor of history at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.

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 20, 2016, Bob Brown and Bill Lohmann delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “On the Back Roads Again: More People, Places, and Pie Around Virginia.”

Head out on the back roads of Virginia again with Richmond Times-Dispatch senior photographer Bob Brown and columnist Bill Lohmann as they encounter memorable characters, explore charming places, and search for their next piece of pie in their new book, On the Back Roads Again: More People, Places, and Pie from Around Virginia. Featuring Brown’s award-winning photographs and Lohmann’s good-humored commentary, this lecture will lead us on a casual journey to many of the places that make Virginia unique.

Bob Brown, a Rockbridge County native, joined the Richmond Times-Dispatch photo staff in 1968 after working in television for the previous 10 years.

Bill Lohmann, an award-winning columnist and a Richmond native, has worked for the Times-Dispatch and, previously, the Richmond News Leader since 1988. He also has reported for United Press International in Richmond, Orlando, and Atlanta, and he began his career as a sports writer for the Charlottesville Daily Progress.

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 12, 2016, Michael D. Gorman delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “‘A Manner Which Would Not Have Been Permitted Towards Slaves’: Race, Reconstruction, and Memory in Postwar Richmond.”

The Civil War in Virginia may have ended at Appomattox, but for those affected by war, additional intense times lay ahead. How did the people of Richmond cope with the sudden influx of paroled prisoners, the presence of northern occupation forces, a devastated city, and the overwhelming refugee crisis that came in the form of thousands of newly emancipated slaves? This lecture explores Reconstruction at the symbolic center of rebellion through a detailed analysis of newly available sources, highlighting how little attention has been given to the actual events and practical realities of Reconstruction. Richmond’s rebuilding was replete with racial violence and white resistance, quite at odds with what is popularly believed about Reconstruction in Virginia.

Michael D. Gorman is a National Park Service historian and author of “A Conqueror or a Peacemaker? Abraham Lincoln in Richmond,” in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (vol. 123, no. 1 [2015]). He is widely known as an expert on Civil War Richmond.

This lecture is cosponsored with the Richmond National Battlefield Park and is free and open to the public.

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 6, 2016, William Geroux will deliver a Banner Lecture entitled “The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s U-Boats.”

In his book, The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s U-Boats, author William Geroux uses the experiences of merchant mariners from Mathews County, Virginia, to tell the largely forgotten story of the heroics and sacrifices of the U.S. Merchant Marine in World War II. Mathews, a rural outpost on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, had been a cradle of merchant sea captains and mariners since before the American Revolution. When America entered World War II in December 1941, Mathews mariners were scattered on ships throughout the war zones, and they became prime targets for German U-boats trying to choke off the Allied supply line. Mathews mariners faced U-boats in the North and South Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean, and even the icy Barents Sea in the Arctic Circle. Some died terrible deaths. Others survived torpedo explosions, flaming oil slicks, storms, shark attacks, and harrowing lifeboat odysseys—only to ship out again as soon as they’d returned to safety. Nearly every family in Mathews County had a personal stake in the U-boat war, and none had a greater stake than the family of Capt. Jesse and Henrietta Hodges and their seven sons, who would experience the war in all its horrors and triumphs.

William Geroux was a newspaper reporter for more than thirty years, mostly with the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He also has worked for Maersk, one of the world's largest commercial shipping companies. He is the author of The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler's U-Boats.

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 22, 2016, Daniel W. Crofts delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "The Paradoxical Emancipator: Abraham Lincoln and the Other Thirteenth Amendment."

When Abraham Lincoln spoke so memorably at Gettysburg about “a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he was looking more toward a hoped-for future rather than accurately describing the American past. The slave system before the Civil War was deeply rooted, protected by the Constitution, and it spread rapidly. Even those Americans who disliked it felt powerless to do anything about slavery in the states where it already existed. They would instead try to stop its expansion. Without doubt, Lincoln abhorred slavery and looked forward to its “ultimate extinction.” Yet he hardly expected anything to happen soon. And he repeatedly vowed that he never would interfere with slavery in the slave states. During his first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, Lincoln even agreed to accept a constitutional amendment that would have barred Congress from legislating against slavery. Had it been ratified by the states, the other thirteenth amendment would have been the polar opposite to the real Thirteenth Amendment—enacted four years and one war later.

Daniel W. Crofts is a professor of history at The College of New Jersey. He is the author of Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis; A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hurlbert and “The Diary of a Public Man”; and Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union. (Introduction Andrew Talkov)

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 8, 2016, Rush Loving Jr., delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "The Well-Dressed Hobo: The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains."

America’s railroads have gone through a tumultuous and dramatic era during the past eighty years, and Virginia played a key role through all of it. They were the times of strong, colorful personalities, men like Virginia’s Claytor brothers, Edward Ball, the man who controlled the DuPont Trust and every evening assembled his “likkah-hound” lieutenants for rounds of bourbon and ginger ale, and W. Thomas Rice, a Northern Neck boy like Ball, who ran the Seaboard Coast Line with the iron fist of a general. There, too, were Jack Fishwick of the Norfolk and Western and Furlong Baldwin, who grew up on a plantation near Cape Charles and used an Atlantic Coast Line office car to build a banking empire. Their stories are played on a stage filled with the drama of boardroom struggles and secret deals, all in the romantic setting of railroad locomotive cabs and the old Richmond Times-Dispatch newsroom. All this is told by a man who, from Depression days in Virginia on into the twenty-first century, watched as those dynamic men and others like them saved the nation’s railroads from ruin and then returned them to a new era of glory.

A native of Virginia, Rush Loving Jr., began his career as a photo-journalist at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and from 1965 until 1969 he was the paper’s business editor. He also served as an associate editor of Fortune, the chief spokesman of the Office of Management and Budget in the Carter White House, and for twenty years headed a consulting firm serving clients that included many of the nation’s major railroads. He is the author of The Well-Dressed Hobo: The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains.

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 August 25, 2016, Mark Tooley delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "Last Chance for Peace: Virginia's Role in the Washington Peace Conference of 1861."

After six states had already seceded, and after Virginia’s Secession Convention was already soon to convene, former President John Tyler, from his James River plantation, suggested in a January 1861 Richmond newspaper column that there be a conference of the border states to seek alternatives to disunion. The Virginia legislature expanded the invitation to all states, whose 131 delegates convened at the Willard Hotel in February for what became known as the “Old Gentlemen’s Convention,” with Tyler presiding. Other Virginia statesmen who attended included future Confederate War Secretary James Seddon and former U.S. Senator William Cabell Rives. Typically the convention is briefly dismissed as a failure, but actually it played an important role in slowing the secession crisis and facilitating Abraham Lincoln’s safe installation into the presidency.

Mark Tooley is author of The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War. He is president of a Washington, D.C. thinktank and a lifelong resident of northern 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 October 20, 2006, Peter Henriques delivered this lecture at the 2006 symposium, 'Virginians in the White House.'

Peter Henriques is Professor of History, Emeritus, at George Mason University. He specializes on Virginia history with particular emphasis on Virginia and the American Revolution and the Virginia founding fathers. Henriques's most recent work is Realistic Visionary: A Portrait of George Washington (2006). (Introduction by Nelson D. Lankford)

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 20, 2006, Mr. Berg delivered this lecture at the 2006 symposium, "Virginians in the White House." Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, A. Scott Berg is the author of best-selling books on Maxwell Perkins, Samuel Goldwyn, Charles Lindbergh, and Katharine Hepburn. He is currently writing a biography of Woodrow Wilson. Mr. Berg holds a B.A. from Princeton University.

(Introduction by Nelson D. Lankford)

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 April 4, 2008, Beth Bailey delivered this lecture at the 2008 symposium, "Sweet Dreams: The Life and Times of Patsy Cline."

The continuing tensions in Winchester over Patsy Cline provide the basis for Beth Bailey's lecture. She discussed Patsy Cline and respectability by looking at questions of sexuality and gender in the context of the importance of "respectability" in postwar American culture. Dr. Bailey is Professor of History at Temple University. She is author of Sex in the Heartland; she is co-editor of A History of our Time; she also wrote From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in 20th Century America and co-authored the twentieth-century chapters in A People and a Nation.

(Introduction by Sandra G. Treadway, Library of Virginia)

(Introduction by Nelson D. Lankford)

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