VMHC Lectures

On January 13, 2022 Dr. Mary A. DeCredico had a discussion of Richmond and its people during the Civil War.

Confederate Citadel: Richmond and its People at War offers a detailed portrait of life’s daily hardships in the rebel capital during the Civil War. Drawing on personal correspondence, private diaries, and newspapers, historian Mary A. DeCredico spotlights the human elements of Richmond’s economic rise and fall, uncovering its significance as the South’s industrial powerhouse throughout the Civil War.

Dr. Mary A. DeCredico is professor of history at the United States Naval Academy and is author of numerous publications, including Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Confederate Woman’s Life and Confederate Citadel: Richmond and Its People at War.

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 28, 2020, Harold Holzer delivered a lecture titled "The Presidents vs. the Press"

Since America’s first president began the very first presidential feud with the press, American chief executives have been engaged in an endless struggle with journalists for control of the reporting that constitutes the first draft of history. This presentation will focus on three exemplars of this tension: Virginians George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, whose relationships with the press were deeply intertwined, and Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson, who modernized the White House relationship with the media in several remarkable ways, both positive and negative. For better and worse, all three Virginia presidents defined and defended the still-manifest hostility between presidents and the leaders they cover.

Harold Holzer, one of the country’s leading authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the political culture of the Civil War era, serves as The Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, co-chairman of The Lincoln Forum, and chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. A prolific writer and lecturer, and frequent guest on television, Holzer has authored, co-authored, and edited forty-two books, including Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860–1861; Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Lincoln President; Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion; and, most recently, The Presidents vs. the Press: The Endless Battle between the White House and the Media—From the Founding Fathers to Fake News. His many awards include the Lincoln Prize and the National Humanities Medal.

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 10, 2022 Gayle Jessup White, author of Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s a Search for Her Family’s Lasting Legacy, discussed her 50-year journey to confirm her family’s oral history that they are descended from the country’s third president.

Growing up in Black middle-class Washington, DC, Jessup White was 13 when she first heard the family lore. Fueled by personal loss and professional angst, she devoted herself to uncovering the truth, a commitment that ultimately led her to Monticello, where she became the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s first community engagement officer. Reclamation is an intimate exploration race, class, and redemption in a country that continues to struggle with its complicated and painful origins.

Gayle Jessup White is Public Relations & Community Engagement Officer at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the non-profit organization that owns and operates Monticello. She is the first descendant of Jefferson and the families he enslaved to be employed by the Foundation. She is the author of Reclamation: Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and a Descendant’s Search for Her Family’s Lasting Legacy.

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 24, 2022 historians Brian Daugherity and Alyce Miller delivered a lecture about Black educational activism in Goochland County in the early twentieth century.

In this lecture, based on their award-winning article published in the Virginia Magazine of History & Biography in 2020, Brian Daugherity and Alyce Miller will analyze community efforts to increase educational access and opportunity for African Americans in Goochland County, Virginia, in the early twentieth century, as well as the connections between this advocacy and other communities across the state and throughout the South. The story, told using various archival records and oral history interviews, demonstrates the power and agency of rural Black southern communities during the Jim Crow era. Recognizing and analyzing this advocacy helps expand our understanding of Black activism during the Jim Crow era, educational philanthropy, and southern educational history, as well as how this era of Black activism was linked to subsequent civil rights achievements.

Brian J. Daugherity is an associate professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author of several books on the civil rights era in Virginia. Alyce Miller is a professor of history at Valencia College. Their article in the Virginia Magazine of History & Biography (vol. 128, no. 1) was awarded the William M. E. Rachal Award for Best Overall Article in the journal in 2020.

Learn more at https://secondunionrosenwaldschool.org and https://digital.library.vcu.edu/islandora/object/vcu%3Agoo.

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 10, 2022 historian William Blair had a discussion of the early Reconstruction era effort by Freedmen’s Bureau officers to document that Black Americans faced little justice for atrocities committed against them.

We tend to think our current situation unique in featuring partisan bubbles in which people mistrust information from the other side. But immediately after the Civil War, a toxic partisan climate caused information on racial violence to become politicized, with eyewitness and newspaper accounts dismissed by opponents as fictions created to mask a political agenda. Military officers led by Ulysses S. Grant and Oliver Otis Howard led an effort by Freedmen’s Bureau officers to document that Black Americans faced little justice for atrocities committed against them. In doing so, they leaked information to Congress that embarrassed the president, their commander, as a concern for civil rights overrode constitutional norms. The resulting Record of Murders and Outrages helped justify military occupation of the South, exposed the rise of the Klan, and shined a light on voter suppression through terrorism that otherwise may have gone unreported.

Dr. William A. Blair is the Walter L. and Helen P. Ferree Professor Emeritus of Middle American History at Penn State University. He is the author of several books on the Civil War era, including Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865–1914; With Malice toward Some: Treason and Loyalty in the Civil War Era; Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861–1865; and The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of 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 November 11, 2021 historian Caroline E. Janney had a discussion about her book on Lee’s army after Appomattox.

In her dramatic new history of the weeks and months after Appomattox, Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox, Caroline E. Janney reveals that Lee’s surrender was less an ending than the start of an interregnum marked by military and political uncertainty, legal and logistical confusion, and continued outbursts of violence. Janney takes readers from the deliberations of government and military authorities to the ground-level experiences of common soldiers. Ultimately, what unfolds is the messy birth narrative of the Lost Cause, laying the groundwork for the defiant resilience of rebellion in the years that followed.

Dr. Caroline E. Janney is the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War and Director of the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. She is the author and editor of several books, including Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation; Cold Harbor to the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign (with Gary W. Gallagher); Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia; and, most recently, Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox.

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 20,2021 writer Catherine Baab-Muguira held a lively and informative lecture to look at Edgar Allan Poe and how his life can teach us counterintuitive lessons on achieving creative success.

Edgar Allan Poe led one of the saddest lives ever. He lost virtually everyone he loved, and his grinding poverty meant that he and his family were sometimes starving in the literal sense. What’s more, Poe’s own impossible personality got him fired from job after job, drawing him into feuds that continued even after his death. Even so, the magnitude of Poe’s success strains credulity. His poetry and fiction have been translated into every major language, and rarer still, people the world over recognize his face. In fact, Poe’s feuds, mistakes, and missteps—the way he did everything “wrong”—worked for him. In that sense, his life is a refutation of traditional self-help and the supposed power of positive thinking. In this fun and accessible lecture, author Catherine Baab-Muguira will discuss how Poe’s life can teach us counterintuitive lessons on achieving creative success—despite the odds and no matter your “flaws.”

Catherine Baab-Muguira is a writer and journalist who has contributed to, among others, Slate, Quartz, CNBC, and NBC News. A frequent podcast and radio guest, with appearances on NPR and Lifehacker’s Upgrade, she lives in Richmond. She is the author of Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice from History's Least Likely Self-Help Guru.

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 bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick on October 20, 2021, who delivered the J. Harvie Wilkinson, Jr. Lecture based on his newest book, “Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy."

When George Washington became president in 1789, he undertook a tour of the ex-colonies to talk to ordinary citizens about his new government, and to imbue in them the idea of being one thing—Americans. In the fall of 2018, Nathaniel Philbrick embarked on his own journey into what Washington called “the infant woody country” to see for himself what America had become in the 229 years since. Writing in a thoughtful first person about his own adventures with his wife Melissa and their dog Dora, Philbrick follows Washington's presidential excursions. The narrative moves smoothly between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries as we see the country through both Washington’s and Philbrick’s eyes. Written at a moment when America’s founding figures are under increasing scrutiny, Travels with George grapples bluntly and honestly with Washington's legacy as a man of the people, a reluctant president, and a plantation owner who held people in slavery.

Nathaniel Philbrick is the author of several bestselling books, including In the Heart of the Sea, winner of the National Book Award; Mayflower, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Valiant Ambition, winner of the George Washington Prize; Bunker Hill, winner of the New England Book Award; In the Hurricane's Eye; and Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy.

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 7, 2021 A. E. Dick Howard held a discussion about the evolution of Virginia’s Constitution from 1776 to the present day.

Virginia’s Declaration of Rights (1776) declares all men to be “equally free and independent.” But, as to the suffrage, the Declaration speaks in more qualified terms; there must be “sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community.” In the years since 1776, successive revisions of Virginia’s Constitution reflect sharp debate over how we should define the political community. Who belongs? Who doesn’t? In the nineteenth century, the idea of community became more inclusive—universal white male suffrage by 1851 and, during Reconstruction, inclusion of African Americans. In 1902, however, Virginians adopted a constitution that, steeped in notions of white supremacy, disenfranchised most black voters. In l971, Virginia renounced that racially tainted era with the adoption of a new constitution. What brought about that change? What work remains to be done?

A. E. Dick Howard is the Warner-Booker Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. He was Executive Director of the Commission on Constitutional Revision, served as counsel to the General Assembly when it received and acted on the commission’s recommendations, and directed the successful referendum campaign for the Constitution’s ratification. His books include the two-volume Commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia and The Road to Runnymede: Magna Carta and Constitutionalism in America.

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 15, 2021 historian David O. Stewart discussed on his book about George Washington and his rise as a leader

Washington’s rise constitutes one of the great self-reinventions in history. In his mid-twenties, this third son of a modest Virginia planter had ruined his own military career in the French and Indian War through poor judgments and brash overreaching. By his mid-forties, that headstrong, unwise young man had evolved into an unassailable leader chosen as the commander in chief of the fledgling Continental Army. By his mid-fifties, he was unanimously elected the nation’s first president. How did Washington—with a scanty education and little inherited wealth—grow from his failures on the Virginia frontier to become the central founder of the United States of America?

David O. Stewart turned to writing after a career practicing law in Washington, D.C. He is a national bestselling and award-winning author of several previous books on American history, including Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America; American Emperor: Aaron Burr’s Challenge to Jefferson's America; The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution; and, most recently, George Washington: The Political Rise of America’s Founding Father.

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