VMHC Lectures

On September 7, 2023, historians Lindsay Chervinsky, Matthew Costello, and Jeffrey Engel gave a lecture about how different generations and communities have eulogized and remembered U.S. presidents since 1799. The death of a chief executive, regardless of the circumstances—sudden or expected, still in office or decades later—is always a moment of reckoning and reflection. Mourning the Presidents brings together renowned and emerging scholars to examine how different generations and communities of Americans have eulogized and remembered U.S. presidents since George Washington’s death in 1799. Over twelve individually illuminating chapters, this volume offers a unique approach to understanding American culture and politics by uncovering parallels between different generations of mourners, highlighting distinct experiences, and examining what presidential deaths can tell us about societal fissures at various critical points in the nation’s history, right up to the present moment. This moderated conversation will feature Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University; Dr. Matthew Costello, Vice President and Interim Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association; and Dr. Jeffrey Engel, Professor and Director for the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University.

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 17, 2023, historian Dr. Michael Lawrence Dickinson discussed his book on the Atlantic slave trade and how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities. In Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, Dr. Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean. The study adopts the perspectives of those enslaved to reveal that, in the eyes of the enslaved, the distinctions were often of degree rather than kind as cities throughout the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience. The tenets of subjugation remained all too similar, as did captives’ need to stave off social death and hold on to their humanity. Almost Dead argues that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth: the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives individually and collectively after forced exportation from West Africa. This was an active process of cultural remembrance, continued resistance, and communal survival. It was in these urban slave communities―within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk―that the enslaved found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by Black lives.

Dr. Michael Lawrence Dickinson is an associate professor of African American history at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a 2019–20 Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His research interests include enslaved Black life, comparative slavery, Black Atlantic studies, and urban history.

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 3, 2023, Mills Kelly gave a lecture about his book, Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail. For over two decades, hikers on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia walked through some of the most beautiful landscapes of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Then, in 1952, the Appalachian Trail Conference moved 300 miles of the trail more than 50 miles to the west. This change was the single largest rerouting of the AT in its long history. Lost in that move were opportunities for hikers to scramble over the Pinnacles of Dan, to sit on Fisher’s Peak and gaze out over the North Carolina Piedmont, or to cross the New River on a flat-bottomed boat called Redbud for a nickel. In his latest book, historian and lifelong AT section hiker Mills Kelly tells the story of a part of the history of the Appalachian Trail that is all but forgotten by hikers, but not by the residents of the southwestern Virginia counties that the trail used to cross. Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail is thus a history of the AT and a story of the power and persistence of historical memory in rural communities once traversed by the AT.

Mills Kelly graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in history and George Washington University with a PhD in history. He is a professor of history at George Mason University where he is also the director of Mason’s award-winning Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. He is the author of Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail. You can learn more about Mills on his website, www.millskelly.net.

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 July 27, 2023, Dr. James Broomall gave a fascinating presentation on artifacts taken from the battlefields of the Civil War that helped shape the memory of the conflict. From Col. Elmer Ellsworth’s death coat to the shattered tree stump of Spotsylvania, Civil War Americans actively collected and displayed objects of war. These battle pieces appeared in small museums at the turn of the twentieth century to help visitors understand the blasted landscapes from which they came. This talk will explore the lives of artifacts after they were taken from the field of action in order to understand how they informed the construction of memory. Objects with violent histories both contested and confirmed the prevailing discourse of romanticism in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, Americans clung to things connected to death and violence. On the other, Americans projected violence as regenerative to justify bloodshed. Dr. James J. Broomall is an associate professor of history at Shepherd University and the director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War, which promotes a dialogue among popular and academic audiences by integrating scholarship, education, and engagement. He is a cultural historian of the Civil War era and has published many articles and essays in journals and magazines, including Common Place: The Journal of Early American Life, Civil War History, and The Journal of the Civil War Era. James is the author of Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers (2019). He is currently working on a book project titled, “Battle Pieces: The Art and Artifacts of the American Civil War Era,” which explores how historical imagery and military artifacts were used to create representations of violence, war, and death. This lecture is presented in partnership with the Wilton House Museum.

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 July 20, 2023, historian and curator Teasel Muir-Harmony gave a lecture on the Apollo program, told through key objects of the Space Age. Project Apollo ranks among the most bold and challenging undertakings of the 20th century. Within less than a decade, the United States leapt from suborbital spaceflight to landing humans on the moon and returning them safely back to Earth. Hundreds of thousands of people helped make these missions possible, while billions more around the world followed the flights. The material legacy of these missions is immense—with thousands of artifacts from rocket engines to spacesuits to the ephemera of life aboard a spacecraft represented in the Smithsonian’s collections. Now, more than fifty years after the last lunar landing, Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of Apollo collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, reassesses the history of Project Apollo through the most evocative objects of the Space Age. She examines artifacts that highlight how Project Apollo touched people’s lives, both within the space program and around the world. More than space hardware alone, the objects she features reflect the deep interconnection between Project Apollo and broader developments in American society and politics.

Dr. Teasel Muir-Harmony is a historian of spaceflight and the curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Her research focuses on the exploration of the Moon, from debates about lunar governance to the use of spaceflight as soft power, the topic of her award-winning book, Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo (2020). She is the author of Apollo to the Moon: A History in 50 Objects (2018) and an advisor to the television series Apollo’s Moon Shot. In addition, Muir-Harmony co-organizes the Space Policy & History Forum and teaches at Georgetown University.

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 July 19, 2023, historian and bestselling author, Kevin R. C. Gutzman, presented the 2023 Hazel and Fulton Chauncey Lecture. Before the consecutive two-term administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, there had only been one other trio of its type: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Kevin R. C. Gutzman’s The Jeffersonians is a complete chronicle of the men, known as The Virginia Dynasty, who served as president from 1801 to 1825. The three close political allies were tightly related: Jefferson and Madison were the closest of friends, and Monroe was Jefferson’s former law student. Their achievements were many, including the founding of the opposition Republican Party in the 1790s, the Louisiana Purchase, and the call upon Congress in 1806 to use its constitutional power to ban the importation of enslaved people beginning on January 1, 1808. Gutzman’s new book details a time in America when three presidents worked toward common goals to face challenges and strengthen our republic in a way we rarely see in American politics today. Kevin R. C. Gutzman is Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University and a faculty member at LibertyClassroom.com. He has his law degree from the University of Texas Law School and his Ph.D. in American history from the University of Virginia. His books include Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary; James Madison and the Making of America; Virginia’s American Revolution; Who Killed the Constitution? (with Thomas Woods); and The Jeffersonians: The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.

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 July 13, 2023, historian and author Brent Tarter lead a discussion of his new book, Constitutional History of Virginia, covering more than 300 years of Virginia’s legislative policy, from colony to statehood, revealing its political and legal backstory. In the only modern comprehensive constitutional history of any state, Brent Tarter traces Virginia history from the very beginning in 1606, when James I chartered the Virginia Company to establish a commercial outpost on the Atlantic coast of North America, through the first two decades of the twenty-first century, and the constitutions along the way that evolved and changed as the demographic, economic, political, and cultural characteristics of Virginia changed. 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 numerous 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; Virginians and Their Histories; and Constitutional History of 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 July 6, 2023, author Hampton Newsome delivered a lecture about the little-known United States offensive against Richmond during the Gettysburg Campaign in the summer of 1863.

Sometimes referred to as the Blackberry Raid, the Union offensive was led by John Dix and provided a significant opportunity as 20,000 U.S. troops advanced on the Confederate capital and sought to cut the railroads supplying Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in Pennsylvania. To some, Dix’s campaign presented a tremendous chance for federal forces to strike hard at Richmond while Lee was in Pennsylvania. To others, it was an unnecessary lark that tied up units deployed more effectively in protecting Washington and confronting Lee’s men on Northern soil.

Hampton Newsome is the author of several award-winning books on the Civil War, including Richmond Must Fall: The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, October 1864 (2012); The Fight for the Old North State: The Civil War in North Carolina, January–May 1864 (2019); and his most recent title, Gettysburg’s Southern Front: Opportunity and Failure at Richmond (2022). Gettysburg’s Southern Front received the Edwin C. Bearss Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Civil War History from the Chicago Civil War Roundtable and was named one of top 10 books of 2022 by Civil War Books and Authors.

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 June 22, 2023, Misha Ewen delivered a fascinating virtual discussion of her new book, “The Virginia Venture: American Colonization and English Society, 1580–1660.” Ordinary women, children, and men in England contributed to (and sometimes opposed) the colonization of the first permanent English colony in America: Jamestown. Across English society, from the streets of London to rural villages in Cornwall, people engaged with fundraising schemes and efforts to transport poor families, they grew and smoked tobacco, and they read literature and listened to sermons in church which promoted colonization in America. In ways that have largely gone unnoticed, they helped to support, or sometimes undermine, the efforts of colonizers. In this lecture, Misha Ewen will discuss her research in archives across England which help us to understand this chapter in United States history through a new lens: as history which intertwined with everyday life in towns and villages across England, with lasting consequences for society “at home” and in the “New World.” Misha Ewen is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Bristol. She has held fellowships at Yale University, the Huntington Library, and Folger Shakespeare Library, and has made several appearances on TV and radio, including “Inside the Tower of London.” The Virginia Venture, published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2022, is her first book. This lecture is sponsored by The Society of Colonial Wars in the Commonwealth of 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 June 8, 2023, Virginia-born historian Michael Trotti shared stories from his research on the movement from public legal executions in the South.

Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race, and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. As a wave of (extralegal) lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states also transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.

Dr. Michael Ayers Trotti is Professor of History at Ithaca College in the Fingerlakes of New York. He was raised on the campus of Union Presbyterian Seminary in northside Richmond and attended Richmond’s public schools, graduating from Richmond Community High School and then Virginia Commonwealth University with a degree in History before earning his masters and Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill. He has written on sensationalism and murder in the Richmond press in his first book, The Body in the Reservoir, and on the history of lynching in the Journal of American History. His latest book is The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American 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.