VMHC Lectures

In this lecture on May 24, 2022, historian Alex Kershaw spoke about his book, Against All Odds: A True Story of Ultimate Courage and Survival in World War II.

As the Allies raced to defeat Hitler, four men, all in the same unit, earned medal after medal for battlefield heroism: Maurice “Footsie” Britt, Michael Daly, Keith Ware, and a baby-faced Texan named Audie Murphy. In the campaign to liberate Europe, each would gain the ultimate accolade, the Congressional Medal of Honor. Tapping into personal interviews and a wealth of primary source material, Alex Kershaw has delivered his most gripping account yet of American courage, spanning more than six hundred days of increasingly merciless combat, from the deserts of North Africa to the dark heart of Nazi Germany. Once the guns fell silent, these four exceptional warriors would discover just how heavy the Medal of Honor could be—and how great the expectations associated with it. Having survived against all odds, who among them would finally find peace?

Alex Kershaw is a journalist and a New York Times bestselling author of books on World War II. Born in York, England, he is a graduate of Oxford University and has lived in the United States since 1994. His many books include The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice; The Liberator: One World War II Soldier's 500-Day Odyssey from the Beaches of Sicily to the Gates of Dachau; The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II; and, most recently, Against All Odds: A True Story of Ultimate Courage and Survival in World War II.

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

George Washington Parke Custis was raised at Mount Vernon by George and Martha Washington. Young “Wash” appears in Edward Savage's 1789 painting of the first presidential family, his small hand placed symbolically on a globe. He would later mark the national landscape by building Arlington House on the Potomac. A poor student, he emerged as an agricultural reformer and sought-after Federalist orator. He championed the plights of Irish Americans and war veterans. An important memoirist who knew the first fifteen presidents, he wrote well-received theatrical works and produced paintings rich in historical detail. In inheriting much of the vast Custis fortune, he also became the enslaver of more than 200 persons. The slow march toward their emancipation became a pivotal struggle of his life, particularly after his daughter's 1831 marriage to Robert E. Lee. Charles S. Clark’s first full-length biography of Custis offers a twenty-first-century reappraisal of a unique life that bridged the American Revolution and the Civil War. As part of this lecture on May 19, 2022, Clark presented portraits, documents, and photographs, including relevant images not in the book.

Charles S. Clark, a retired journalist. A native of Arlington, Virginia, he continues to write the weekly “Our Man in Arlington” column for the Falls Church News-Press. In July 2019, he retired as senior correspondent for Government Executive Media Group, part of Atlantic Media. He previously has worked as an editor or writer for The Washington Post, Congressional Quarterly, National Journal, and Time-Life Books. He is the author of several books, including Arlington County Chronicles; Hidden History of Arlington County; Lost Arlington County; and, most recently, George Washington Parke Custis: A Rarefied Life in America's First Family.

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 28, 2022, historian Jane Turner Censer presented a lecture about the literary career of Amélie Rives.

By 1890, Amélie Rives was well-known all over America, both as the author of a scandalous novel and as a beauty who had married a very wealthy heir of New York’s Astor family. Only five years earlier, Rives, then a twenty-two-year-old living in the family plantation outside Charlottesville, had burst upon the literary scene with a short story in the "Atlantic Monthly," arguably the nation’s most prestigious literary magazine, and a poem in the highly regarded Century Illustrated Monthly. Jane Turner Censer draws from her new biography, "The Princess of Albemarle: Amélie Rives, Author and Celebrity at the Fin de Siècle," to explain how Rives went from anonymity to a household name. In her quest to become a published author, Rives deployed charm, unconventional behavior, and family connections to bring her stories and poems to the notice of prominent publishers. Censer also indicates how Rives, while achieving celebrity and a literary career, struggled with the expectations of her society, her family, and her own notions about propriety.

Jane Turner Censer, Professor Emerita of History at George Mason University, is a specialist on the nineteenth-century United States and southern women. Her essays and prize-winning articles have appeared in numerous journals including the Journal of Southern History, Comparative Studies in Society and History, American Journal of Legal History, Southern Cultures, and American Quarterly. In 2017–18 she served as president of the Southern Historical Association. She is the author of several books, including "North Carolina Planters and Their Children, 1800 1860"; "The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865–1895"; and, most recently, "The Princess of Albemarle: Amélie Rives, Author and Celebrity at the Fin de Siècle."

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

Join historian James Horn who will deliver the 2022 Stuart G. Christian, Jr. Lecture on the subject of his newest book, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America.

In 1561, an Indian youth was abducted from Virginia by Spanish explorers and taken to Spain. Called by the Spanish Paquiquineo and subsequently Don Luís, he was introduced to King Philip II in Madrid, as well as to influential Catholic prelates and courtiers, before being sent back to America to help with the conversion of Indian peoples. In Mexico City, he converted to Catholicism and after many years was eventually able to secure his return to his homeland on the York River as a guide to a small group of Jesuits. There, he quickly organized a war party to destroy the mission and everyone associated with it. During the remainder of the sixteenth century, he and his brother, Powhatan, built a massive chiefdom that stretched from the James River to the Potomac, and from the coast to the piedmont. When the English arrived in Virginia in 1607, he and his brother chief launched a series of attacks on the settlers in an attempt to drive them out. These wars, the first Anglo-Indian wars in North America, spanned the greater part of the next four decades. Known by the English as Opechancanough, he was ultimately unsuccessful but would come closer than any of his peers in early America to succeeding. He survived to be nearly 100 years old and died, as he lived, fighting European colonists.

James Horn is the president of the Jamestown Rediscovery Foundation at Historic Jamestowne, the original site of the first permanent English settlement in America. He is author and editor of eight books on early America, including 1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy and A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America. His most recent book, A Brave and Cunning Prince: The Great Chief Opechancanough and the War for America, was published last November.

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 24, 2022, Carl R. Lounsbury discussed the four centuries of Chesapeake history as revealed through material world of Eyre Hall.

Erected in 1759 on the Eastern Shore, Eyre Hall is still occupied by descendants of its builder, Littleton Eyre. Since construction, succeeding generations acquired and preserved a rich variety of documents and objects including furniture, books, silver, and paintings. Only a small handful of houses in Virginia can claim such continuity. The Material World of Eyre Hall examines the everchanging meanings of this place in Virginia history. Its origins reveal the cultural aspirations of a deferential society built on slavery that emerged in the colonial period. The plantation suffered the tribulations wrought by the Revolution, Civil War, Reconstruction, and several depressions, undermining its social and economic foundations. By the early twentieth century, the house was seen as a nostalgic exemplar of an earlier age, a storehouse of family legends and traditions. Preservation and survival rather than expansion and change became the dominate attitude toward the house and grounds. What does this inheritance mean today in the wake of transformative events that continue to reshape the interpretation of Virginia’s past?

Carl R. Lounsbury retired as the Senior Architectural Historian at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in 2016. Over a thirty-five-year career, he was involved in the research and restoration of many buildings in Williamsburg’s Historic Area. Since 2002, Lounsbury has taught architectural history at William and Mary. His many publications include An Illustrated Glossary of Early Southern Architecture and Landscape; The Courthouses of Early Virginia; An Architectural History of Bruton Parish Church; and, most recently, The Material World of Eyre Hall: Four Centuries of Chesapeake 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 April 7, 2022, Kimberly C. Borchard presented a lecture about the 500-year-old myth of Appalachian gold and its catastrophic consequences for the Native Floridians that gave Appalachia its name.

Growing up in rural Appalachia, Kim Borchard was well-acquainted with stereotypes of Appalachian poverty and backwardness. For that reason, she was struck by accounts of an opulent, gold-rich province by the name of Apalache in sixteenth-century Spanish, Portuguese, and Incan accounts of early European forays into Florida. What at first seemed an onomastic coincidence proved to be a pervasive and ultimately deadly myth: generation after generation of explorers and would-be conquistadors from Spain, Portugal, France, and finally England, marauded Apalachee territory and ravaged Native societies of the southeast in the attempt to seize the fabled gold and silver mines associated first with the Apalachee people, and later with the Appalachian Mountains. This lecture described the devastating power of sixteenth-century “fake news” over the course of two centuries while following the Apalachee diaspora out of the Florida panhandle and into central Louisiana, where the Talimali Band of Apalachee Indians continue to fight for their sovereignty to this day.

Kim Borchard earned her B.A. and M.A. from Ohio University and her PhD from the University of Chicago. She teaches courses in Spanish, Latin American colonial literature, and Spanish for Social Justice at Randolph-Macon College. She is the author of Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528–1715.

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 15, 2022, Dr. Charles Bryan and VMHC president and CEO Jamie Bosket had a conversation about some of the topics covered in Dr. Bryan’s latest book, "Imperfect Past Volume II: More History in a New Light."

The late southern writer John Egerton observed that there are three kinds of history: what actually happened, what we are told happened, and what finally came to believe happened. It is that third type that author and former VMHC president and CEO Charles Bryan addresses in many of the essays in Volume 2 of "Imperfect Past." Bryan challenges many of the assumptions about the past his generation was taught in schools some sixty years ago. A once simplistic story has become more complex, but at the same time, more compelling and provocative. The lecture will consist of a conversation between Dr. Bryan and current VMHC president and CEO Jamie Bosket.

Dr. Charles F. Bryan, Jr., is an American historian who spent most of his career in the museum field, including twenty years as president of the Virginia Historical Society. He is the author of several books, including "Imperfect Past: History in a New Light" and "Imperfect Past Volume II: More History in a New Light."

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

Interested in addressing a problem, making something better, or helping others in your community? Whether you are a veteran activist or a novice eager to get started, the global pandemic has impacted the ways in which we can advocate for change.

Join a panel of today’s changemakers as they discuss how to tap into your passion, get involved in a cause, apply your unique skills, and take action in an age of working-from-home. Several expert panelists featured in the museum’s recent Today’s Agents of Change exhibition will offer insights from their experience and answer your questions about conducting advocacy work from home.

In April 2021 we will continue this conversation with, Activism from Home: Spring into Action, a virtual workshop that will connect new and experienced advocates with others who share your interests. Visit VirginiaHistory.org/Events

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

In this virtual event on February 19, 2021, VMHC Curator Karen Sherry led audiences in a conversation with Dr. Gladys West. This Dinwiddie County native helped develop GPS and other satellite mapping technology during her long career at the Naval Surface Weapons Center at Dahlgren, Virginia. Dr. West shared stories from her remarkable life, including rising from rural poverty to gain an education and facing racism and sexism as one of the first two black women to join Dahlgren in 1956. Since retiring, she has continued to value education: she earned a Ph.D. and established a scholarship fund for students seeking careers in STEM fields. Dr. West has also recently published an autobiography, It Began with a Dream (2020).

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 12 , 2018, Richard Brookhiser delivered the banner lecture, “John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court.”

In 1801, a genial and brilliant Revolutionary War veteran and politician became the fourth Chief Justice of the United States. He would hold the post for thirty-four years (still a record), expounding the Constitution he loved. Before he joined the Court, it was the weakling of the federal government, lacking in dignity and clout. After he died, it could never be ignored again. Through three decades of dramatic cases involving businessmen, scoundrels, Native Americans, and slaves, Marshall defended the federal government against unruly states, established the Supreme Court’s right to rebuke Congress or the president, and unleashed the power of American commerce. For better and for worse, he made the Supreme Court a pillar of American life. In John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court, award-winning biographer Richard Brookhiser vividly chronicles America’s greatest judge and the world he made. In this lecture, he will discuss Marshall’s landmark court decisions and his legacy today.

Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and the author of twelve previous books, including Founder’s Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln; James Madison; and John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court.

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Roller-Bottimore Foundation and is cosponsored with Preservation Virginia’s John Marshall House and the John Marshall Foundation and is free to their members.

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