Virginia Historical Society Podcast

On February 22, 2018, Lynn Rainville delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Doing Their Bit: The Surprising Role of Virginians in the Great War.” In this illustrated lecture, Lynn Rainville revealed the crucial roles that Virginians played in the Great War. These individuals ranged from drafted soldiers to politicians (including Staunton native, Woodrow Wilson) and from locally born horses to their ferriers. These patriots also included female stenographers, African American doctors, domestic gardeners, National Guard troops, and army chaplains. Of these hundreds of thousands of volunteers, more than 3,600 lost their lives as a direct result of the war, impacting families throughout the state. And yet many of their sacrifices have been forgotten. Rainville concluded her talk with a study of statues erected in Virginia after the war to reveal a more complete story of service and sacrifice during the Great War. Dr. Lynn Rainville is a research professor in the humanities at Sweet Briar College and a fellow at t

On January 25, 2018, Jonathan W. White delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Our Little Monitor: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War.” On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor met the CSS Virginia in battle in Hampton Roads, Virginia—the first time ironclad vessels would engage each other in combat. For four hours the two ships pummeled one another as thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians watched from the shorelines. Although the battle ended in a draw, this engagement would change the very nature of naval warfare. The “wooden walls” of navies around the world suddenly appeared far more vulnerable to political and military leaders. At the same time, in the weeks after the battle of Hampton Roads, Americans developed their own ideas for improving the Monitor or for sinking the Virginia. This talk will discuss some of the inventions devised by terrified northerners as well as the legacy of the USS Monitor in American life and culture since its sinking on New Year’s Eve 1862. Dr. Jonathan W. Wh

On October 5, 2017, Gregory Wilson delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Toxic Dust: The History and Legacy of Virginia’s Kepone Disaster.” In July 1975, news broke about workers at Life Science Products Company in Hopewell poisoned while making the pesticide Kepone, the brand name of chlordecone. Further investigations showed Life Science had contracted with Allied Chemical, a larger firm with a plant in Hopewell, to make Kepone and that both companies dumped Kepone waste into the James River and its nearby tributaries. The events led to a number of significant events, including a fishing and harvesting ban that remained in various forms through the 1980s, new state and federal environmental regulations, and federal court cases that led to the creation of the Virginia Environmental Endowment in 1977. Forty years later, Kepone remains in the James River sediment but in much reduced levels. Still, traces of Kepone have been found in James River fish today. The complete toxic effects of Kepone are not fully kno

On December 7, 2017, Alyson Lindsey Taylor-White delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Shockoe Hill Cemetery: A Richmond Landmark's History.” In 1822, Richmond’s Common Council faced a grave dilemma, literally. The nation, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the capital city of Richmond were in the grips of a severe economic depression, one of the young nation’s first. It was not a good time for the city to invest in capital improvements, much less acquire real estate. And yet they felt they had no choice but to do just that. In particular, the city faced a desperate shortage of available private and church properties to inter the dead safely and in a sanitary method. The decision was made to create Richmond’s first necropolis that would be designed for the living as much as for the dead. Created on the cusp of the rural cemetery movement that would soon sweep the nation, Shockoe Hill Cemetery was laid out by city surveyor Richard Young in 1824 to have a pleasing, picturesque, park-like setting. Famous occupant

On November 2, 2017, Brian Burns delivered a Banner Lecture at the Virginia Historical Society entitled “Richmond’s Gilded Age: The Grit Behind the Glitz.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, Richmond entered the Gilded Age seeking bright prospects while struggling with its own past. During a labor convention in conservative Richmond, white supremacists prepared to enforce segregation at gunpoint. Progressives attempted to gain political power by unveiling a wondrous new marvel: Richmond’s first electric streetcar. Handsome lawyer Thomas J. Cluverius was accused of murdering a pregnant woman and dumping her body in the city reservoir, sparking Richmond’s trial of the century. And after Jefferson Davis’s death in 1889, elites launched an arduous monument-building campaign. Author Brian Burns takes us on a romp through the River City as it headed toward a new century. Brian Burns recently published his third book, Gilded Age Richmond: Gaiety, Greed and Lost Cause Mania. His previous titles include Lewis Ginter

On September 14, 2017, Sharon B. Smith delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel.” During the Civil War and throughout the rest of the nineteenth century there was no star that shone brighter than that of a small red horse who was known as Stonewall Jackson’s Little Sorrel. Robert E. Lee’s Traveller eventually became more familiar but was mostly famous for his looks. Not so with Little Sorrel. Early in the war he became known as a horse of great personality and charm, an eccentric animal with an intriguing background. Like Traveller, his enduring fame was due initially to the prominence of his owner and the uncanny similarities between the two of them. The little red horse long survived Jackson and developed a following of his own. In fact, he lived longer than almost all horses who survived the Civil War as well as many thousands of human veterans. His death in 1886 drew attention worthy of a deceased general, his mounted remains have been admired by hundreds of thousands of peo

On August 24, 2017, 2017, Jon Kukla delivered a Banner Lecture at the Virginia Historical Society entitled “Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty.” Patrick Henry is remembered today mostly for one line from one speech that he made: “Give me liberty or give me death.” This is a shame because he was one of the leading patriots of the Revolutionary era, Virginia’s first governor after independence, a powerful voice in the early republic, and a great orator and statesman who played such a crucial role in shaping the course of Revolutionary Virginia’s history. In Patrick Henry: Champion of Liberty, Jon Kukla, who has been studying Henry for years and has even lived on one of his former plantations, restores Patrick Henry to the front rank of American Revolutionary patriots. Jon Kukla has served as director of historical research and publishing at the Library of Virginia, curator and then director of the Historic New Orleans Collection, and as director of Red Hill, The Patrick Henry National Memorial in Charlotte C

On August 3, 2017, at noon, August Wallmeyer delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “The Extremes of Virginia: Two Commonwealths, Separated and Unequal.” August Wallmeyer brings his unique perspectives on public policy issues in Virginia to bear on three “rural, poor, and largely unknown” areas of Virginia: Southwest, Southside, and the Eastern Shore. With his forty plus years involvement with the Virginia General Assembly, Wallmeyer dissects conditions in the “extremes of Virginia” and offers his thoughts on practical steps to improve economic, social, and cultural conditions for the 10 percent of Virginians living there. He will graphically assemble a portrait of a Virginia largely unknown to those living in the commonwealth’s wealthier and more prosperous urban corridor.August Wallmeyer is a former radio and television news reporter, government speechwriter, and energy trade association lobbyist. He is the author of The Extremes of Virginia. The father of three, he now lives in Goochland County with his wife

On July 19 at 5:30 p.m., Dr. William M. Kelso delivered the Hazel and Fulton Chauncey Lecture entitled “Jamestown, the Truth Revealed.” What was life really like for the band of adventurers who first set foot on the banks of the James River in 1607? Important as the accomplishments of these men and women were, the written records pertaining to them are scarce, ambiguous, and often conflicting. And those curious about the birthplace of the United States have had little to turn to except dramatic and often highly fictionalized reports. In Jamestown, the Truth Revealed, William Kelso takes us literally to the soil where the Jamestown colony began, unearthing footprints of a series of structures, beginning with the James Fort, to reveal fascinating evidence of the lives and deaths of the first settlers, of their endeavors and struggles, and new insight into their relationships with the Virginia Indians. He offers up a lively account, framed around a narrative of the archaeological team's exciting discoveries. Wi

On July 13, 2017, Mary Lynn Bayliss will delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “The Dooleys of Richmond: Two Generations of an Irish Immigrant Family in the Old and New South.” Two weeks after their wedding in Alexandria, Virginia, Irish Immigrants John and Sarah Dooley were at home in Richmond when John’s first advertisement for his hat manufacturing business appeared in a Richmond newspaper. Five years later, when John had become one of Richmond’s prominent residents, their second son, James Henry Dooley, destined to become a lawyer and one of the city’s great philanthropists, was born. The story of his family and their devotion to the city and the South, The Dooleys of Richmond sheds new light on the experience of Irish immigrants in the urban South before, during and after the Civil War. James Henry Dooley served three terms in the Virginia House of Delegates before becoming a key figure in the development of the industries and infrastructure of the New South. Maymont, the Gilded Age estate he and his wife

On June 1, 2017, at noon, David Cox delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "The Paradox of Robert Edward Lee." Robert E. Lee remains as controversial today as he was in his own era, in part because of the contradictions he embodied. A critic of slavery and secession, he fought for the cause that embodied each. He was the only man ever offered the command of armies that opposed each other. Deemed one of the greatest of military minds, his side still lost. Then, he became one of the chief proponents of reconciliation, yet he held serious reservations pertaining to race and reconstruction. In his book, The Religious Life of Robert E. Lee (March 2017), David Cox explores how Lee’s faith influenced his views and his actions. In this lecture, he will examine how Lee’s religious convictions guided two of his most important, if paradoxical, decisions: to resign his commission and side with Virginia in 1861, then to accept the presidency of Washington College in Lexington as a means of promoting the reconciliation he hop

On May 11, 2017, at noon, Paul Aron delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Feuding Founders: Battling and Backstabbing in Early America.” “Thirteen clocks were made to strike together,” John Adams wrote in 1818, recalling how the thirteen colonies united to seize their independence. Adams knew this had been a tentative and tenuous unity. During and after the Revolution, the founders were not only debating but also smearing, screaming, spitting, and occasionally shooting at each other—their politics every bit as polarized as our own. Yet despite these feuds—and even to some extent because of them—the founders (in contrast to today’s politicians) managed to find ways to build a nation. Paul Aron is director of publications for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He is the author of Founding Feuds: The Rivalries, Clashes, and Conflicts that Forged a Nation, Why the Turkey Didn’t Fly, and We Hold These Truths . . . and Other Words That Made America. This lecture is cosponsored with the Society of Colonial Wars

On April 27, 2017, Jonathan W. White delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Dreams of War and Peace: How Americans Experienced the Civil War in their Sleep.” The Civil War placed new and unique strains on nineteenth-century Americans, and their nightly visions reflected those hardships. Sometimes the war intruded on people’s slumber, vividly bringing to life the horrors of the conflict. For others, nighttime was an escape from the hard realities of life and death in wartime. In this talk, Jonathan W. White will explore what dreams meant to Civil War-era Americans, and how their dreams reveal that generation’s deepest longings—their hopes and fears, desires and struggles, and guilt and shame. When Americans recorded their dreams in their diaries, letters and memoirs, they sought to make sense of the changing world around them, and to cope with the confusion, despair, and loneliness of life amid the turmoil of a war the likes of which they had never imagined. Dr. Jonathan W. White is associate professor of Ameri

On April 7, 2017 at noon, Gary W. Gallagher delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “The Best Rebel Reminiscence: Edward Porter Alexander's Fighting for the Confederacy.” Edward Porter Alexander’s Military Memoirs of a Confederate: A Critical Narrative (1907) and Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander (1989) stand unchallenged as the most analytical, dispassionate, and influential books of their genre. Alexander wrote from a singular perspective as one who had served on the staffs of Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, and P. G. T. Beauregard before beginning a career in the artillery that soon revealed him to be the most gifted gunner in the Confederacy. Literally present from Manassas to Appomattox, Alexander participated in all the great battles of the Western Theater as well as fighting in Tennessee in late 1863. This lecture will assess Alexander’s two books, highlighting the process by which he crafted them and the degree to which they influenced subsequen

All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s by J. Harvie Wilkinson III Duration: (01:10:23) On March 29, 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

On March 16, 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 i

On March 2, 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

On February 9, 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.

On February 22, 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 p

On January 18 at 5:30 p.m., 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 Ric