On March 7, 2024, biographer Rebecca Boggs Roberts provided an unflinching look at First Lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. While this nation has yet to elect its first female president—and though history has downplayed her role—just over a century ago a woman became the nation’s first acting president. In fact, she was born in 1872, and her name was Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. She climbed her way out of Appalachian poverty and into the highest echelons of American power and in 1919 effectively acted as the first female president of the United States when her husband, Woodrow Wilson, was incapacitated. Beautiful, brilliant, charismatic, catty, and calculating, she was a complicated figure whose personal quest for influence reshaped the position of First Lady into one of political prominence forever. Rebecca Boggs Roberts offered an unflinching look at the woman whose ascent mirrors that of many powerful American women before and since, one full of the compromises and complicities women have undertaken throughout time in order to find security for themselves and make their mark on history. Rebecca Boggs Roberts is an award-winning educator, author, and speaker, and a leading historian of American women’s suffrage and civic participation. She is currently deputy director of events at the Library of Congress and serves on the board of the National Archives Foundation, on the Council of Advisors of the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation, and on the Editorial Advisory Committee of the White House Historical Association. Her books include the award-winning The Suffragist Playbook: Your Guide to Changing the World; Suffragists in Washington, D.C.: The 1913 Parade and the Fight for the Vote; and Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson. 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 22, 2024, historians Cassandra Good and Carolyn Eastman presented a lecture on the Washington family, celebrity, and the development of the new United States. While it’s widely known that George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, few are aware that they raised children together. In Good's book First Family, we see Washington as a father figure and are introduced to the children he helped raise, tracing their complicated roles in American history. The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye, well-known as George Washington’s family and keepers of his legacy. By turns petty and powerful, glamorous and cruel, the Custises used Washington as a means to enhance their own power and status. As enslavers committed to the American empire, the Custis family embodied the failures of the American experiment that finally exploded into civil war—all the while being celebrities in a soap opera of their own making. Cassandra Good is a writer and historian focused on gender and politics in early America who currently serves as Associate Professor of History at Marymount University. She is the author of the prize-winning Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic and her newest book, First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America. Carolyn Eastman is an historian of early America with special interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century histories of political culture, the media, and gender. She is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author most recently of the award-winning The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity. 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 8, 2024, historian Marvin T. Chiles discussed the subject of his new book The Struggle to Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond. Much is known about the City of Richmond’s troubled past with race and race relations. Richmond was one of the largest entrepot for the transatlantic slave trade, the capital of the Confederacy, a foundational city for Jim Crow segregation, the sacred home of Confederate memorialization, and the hotbed of Massive Resistance to school desegregation. Less talked about, however, is that Richmond was a national leader in racial reconciliation efforts after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Residents, business leaders, and public history organizations spent the last three decades of the twentieth century seeking to fix Richmond’s economy and public history scene to overcome its reputation and reality of racial strife, a conundrum created by the city’s troubled history. Yet, Richmond’s reconciliation movement unintendedly exacerbated the vestiges of past discrimination, that being racial gaps in wealth building, housing stability, and educational achievement. This lecture, based on The Struggle for Change, implores Richmonders and those interested in urban affairs, race relations, and southern history to not see current racial disparities as a continuum of past discrimination. Rather, Richmond’s recent history shows that progressive actions and actors exacerbated systemic issues through making positive changes in their city, the South, and nation. Dr. Marvin T. Chiles is the Assistant Professor of African American History at Old Dominion University. The Struggle for Change is his first book. He has also published several articles, including “A Period of Misunderstanding: Reforming Jim Crow in Richmond, Virginia, 1930–1954,” which won the William M. E. Rachal Award from the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in 2021.

On January 11, 2024, historian John Reeves gave a lecture on the rise of Ulysses S. Grant during an extraordinary decade. Captain Ulysses S. Grant, an obscure army officer who resigned his commission in 1854, rose to become general-in-chief of the United States Army in 1864. What accounts for this astonishing turn-around? Was it destiny? Or was he just an ordinary man, opportunistically benefiting from the turmoil of the Civil War to advance to the highest military rank? Grant’s life story is an almost inconceivable tale of redemption within the context of his fraught relationships with his antislavery father and his slaveholding wife. His connection to the institution of slavery, before and during the war, will be reconsidered in this talk. John Reeves has been a teacher, editor, and writer for more than thirty years. The Civil War, in particular, has been his passion since he first read Bruce Catton’s The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War as an elementary school student in the 1960s. He is the author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case against an American Icon, A Fire in the Wilderness: The First Battle Between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession, and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant. 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 December 14, 2023, historian John Ragosta gave a lecture on Patrick Henry’s final political battles. In a democracy, how do you disagree with government policy? What is a loyal opposition? In the 1790s, hyper-partisan political battles threatened to tear the new nation apart. Under the Sedition Act, a person criticizing the government could be jailed; opposition newspaper editors were targeted. In response, the Kentucky Resolutions, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, declared that Kentucky could proclaim federal laws unconstitutional and “nullify” them—secession, state versus state, and against the federal government, loomed. Newspapers warned of “Civil War!” George Washington begged Patrick Henry to come out of retirement, oppose these dangerous policies, and save the union. Though Henry had been the leading antifederalist, arguing against ratification of the Constitution, in 1799, he rebuked Jefferson and insisted that since “we the people” adopted the Constitution—even though Henry had opposed it—anyone contesting federal policy must seek reform “in a constitutional way.” Henry helped to define a loyal opposition. Unfortunately, that story was suppressed by Jeffersonians throughout the 19th century. John Ragosta discussed this story—recounted in For the People, For the Country: Patrick Henry’s Final Political Battle—a story of how a democracy must work if it is to survive. John A. Ragosta is a historian at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. He is the author of Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed and For the People, For the Country: Patrick Henry’s Final Political Battle. This program, part of the VMHC's multi-year initiative to commemorate the 250th Anniversary of the U.S., is presented by the John Marshall Center for Constitutional History & Civics. 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 30, 2023, historian Jessica Taylor discussed the subject of her new book, Plain Paths and Dividing Lines: Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. This talk follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who, in pursuit of freedom or profit, crossed emerging boundaries—fortifications, law, property lines—surrounding developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and others beyond the region by canoe and road for centuries. Their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland planters erected fences, policed unfree laborers and Native neighbors, and dispatched land surveyors. Using Native trade routes and places, and sometimes with the help of Native people themselves, escaping indentured and enslaved people absconded fueled by their own developing, alternate ideas about freedom and connection. Taylor talks about how Native land provided the perfect setting for early resistance to colonialism, and about exciting new efforts to document their escapades. Dr. Jessica Taylor is an assistant professor in the history department at Virginia Tech. As a public historian, she collaborates on projects across the Southeast as diverse as oral histories with boatbuilders, augmented reality tours of historic sites, and reconstructed maps of precolonial landscapes. Her current work connects graduate and undergraduate students to history firsthand through fieldwork experiences in oral history, and an ongoing project documenting escape attempts of indentured servants and enslaved people in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. She is the author of Plain Paths and Dividing Lines: Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. 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 24, 2023, Maj. Gen. Jason Q. Bohm, USMC, gave a lecture on the formation of the Marine Corps and its role in the American Revolution. The fighting prowess of united states marines is second to none, but few know of the Corps’ humble beginnings and what it achieved during the early years of the American Revolution. Jason Bohm rectifies this oversight with his eye-opening Washington’s Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775–1777. Bohm artfully tells the story of the creation of the Continental Marines and the men who led them during the parallel paths followed by the Army and Marines in the opening years of the war and through the early successes and failures at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Canada, Boston, Charleston, and more. Washington’s Marines is the first complete study of its kind to weave the men, strategy, performance, and personalities of the Corps’ formative early years into a single compelling account. Maj. Gen. Jason Q. Bohm is a Marine with more than 30 years of service. An infantryman by trade, he has commanded at every level from platoon commander to commanding general in peacetime and war. Bohm also served in several key staff positions, including as a strategic planner with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School, House Director, Marine Corps Office of Legislative Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, and Chief of Staff of U.S. Naval Striking and Support Forces, NATO. Bohm has a bachelor’s degree in marketing, a master’s degree in military studies, and a master’s degree in national security studies. Jason has written several articles for the Marine Corps Gazette and won various writing awards from the Marine Corps Association. He is the author of From the Cold War to ISIL: One Marine’s Journey and Washington’s Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775–1777. 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 8, 2023, award-winning author Edward Ayers delivered a lecture about his book, "American Visions: The United States, 1800–1860." The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest. Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. Ayers turns his distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today. Edward Ayers is university professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. He has received the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes for his scholarship, been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and was the founding board chair of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond. He is executive director of New American History and Bunk, dedicated to making the nation’s history more visible and useful for a broad range of audiences. This lecture was co-hosted by American Civil War Museum, Black HIstory Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia, and The Valentine. 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 21, 2023, Viola Franziska Müller gave a virtual-only lecture about her book, Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South. Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and, particularly discussed in this lecture, Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. Though all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migrants, runaway slaves who sought refuge in the urban South were antebellum America's undocumented people, forging lives free from bondage but without the legal status of freedpeople. Spanning from the 1810s to the start of the Civil War, Müller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved Black people in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities. Viola Franziska Müller is a historian at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at University of Bonn, Germany. She received her PhD from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 2020. Studying the history of U.S. slavery and free people of African descent in Europe, she is particularly interested in the legacies of slavery and the trajectories of racism. She is the author of Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban 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.

On September 14, 2023, Greg May discussed his eye-opening new book, A Madman's Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom, about a sensational antebellum Virginia will that freed almost 400 people from slavery. John Randolph of Roanoke—one of Virginia’s best-known statesmen—was a relentless defender of the slave states’ rights, so his deathbed declaration that he wanted to free the people he enslaved took nearly everyone by surprise. But it soon emerged that Randolph had left inconsistently written wills. His lifetime of eccentric behavior gave his heirs ample room to claim that none of Randolph’s wills was valid because he had been mad. The resulting litigation took twelve years. It gives us vivid insights into the intimate lives of antebellum Virginians and a wholly unexpected look at how Virginia’s courts dealt with questions concerning slavery. Although the courts ultimately upheld the will that freed Randolph’s slaves, the story does not have a happy ending. Virginia law required the new freedmen to leave the state, and before they could settle 3000 acres purchased for them in western Ohio, a mob of angry white farmers drove them away. Gregory May is a historian who writes about the early American republic. He graduated from William and Mary and Harvard Law School, clerked for Justice Powell on the United States Supreme Court, and then practiced law for thirty years. He is the author of Jefferson’s Treasure, a political biography of Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. 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 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.