VMHC Lectures

On April 6, 2023, historian David O. Stewart delivered a lecture on the history behind his novel, The Burning Land, the second volume of his Overstreet saga. Writing a Civil War novel inspired by an ancestor’s long and tragic service in the Twentieth Maine Infantry meant considering how war changes soldiers, those closest to them, and communities. The impact on soldiers in combat has been called “...

On March 16, 2023, historian Connor Williams discussed his role as lead historian for the U.S. Congress’ Naming Commission, with particular emphasis on the process of recommending new names for the three Virginia forts—Fort Lee, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Pickett. Though the Civil War’s battles were settled on the fields of our nation more than a century and half ago, the fields of our collective me...

On March 1, 2023, bestselling author Douglas Brinkley delivered a lecture about his newest book, "Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening". New York Times bestselling author and acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley chronicles the rise of environmental activism during the Long Sixties, telling a highly ch...

On February 16, 2023, historian Brent Morris gave a lecture examining the lives of the maroons living in the Great Dismal Swamp and their struggles for liberation. The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls more than 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, wh...

On February 2, 2023, writer William Paul Lazarus gave a virtual lecture about his book, Virginia’s Civil Rights Hero: The Rev. Curtis W. Harris Sr. Just three months before Curtis Harris was born, the Virginia State Legislature passed the Racial Integrity Act, which banned interracial marriage down to “a single drop” of African blood. Harris was the sixth child of an impoverished sharecropper and...

On January 19, 2023, author and journalist Michael Lee Pope traced the history of Harry Byrd’s conservative political organization, which ran Virginia politics for more than half a century. The story of the Byrd Machine is one that begins after the Civil War when Senator William Mahone created the first political machine with support from Black voters and Black elected officials. That was followed...

On December 8, 2022, historian Jeffry D. Wert delivered a lecture on the bloody attack and defense of the “Mule Shoe” at Spotsylvania Court House on May 12, 1864. The Union assault on the Confederate Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania on May 12, 1864, ignited a struggle unlike any other during the four-year conflict. A Massachusetts soldier described the fighting as “the death-grapple of the war” as the fo...

On November 3, 2022, author Jack Shaum lectured on the subject of his newest book, 122 Years on the Old Bay Line. Old Bay Line is the name by which the Baltimore Steam Packet Company was best known over most of its 122-year history of nightly carrying passengers and freight on the Chesapeake Bay between Baltimore and Norfolk. These steamers are often mistakenly referred to as ferry boats, but they...

On October 19, 2022, award-winning Civil War historian Gary W. Gallagher delivered the 2022 Hazel and Fulton Chauncey Lecture. Lt. Gen. Jubal A. Early’s 1864 Valley Campaign in the summer and autumn of 1864 reached a decisive climax in the battle of Cedar Creek on October 19. Far less famous than "Stonewall" Jackson’s more limited operations in the Valley during May–June 1862, Early’s feat...

On October 13, 2022, historian Robert Pierce Forbes took a fascinating look at Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. When Thomas Jefferson used the term “my country,” he almost always meant Virginia. Nowhere is this truer than in his only published book, "Notes on the State of Virginia." Released while the United States was just taking shape, Notes profoundly influenced the pe...

On October 13, 2022, Dr. Philip Levy gave a fascinating lecture on the principal archaeological sites associated with George Washington and what they say individually and collectively about his life and career. No figure in American history has generated more public interest or sustained more scholarly research around his various homes and habitations than has George Washington. The Permanent Resi...

On September 22, 2022, historian James Scott discussed his book about the controversial firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945. Seven minutes past midnight on March 9, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a more than 1,800-degree firestorm that liquefied asphalt and vaporized thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flat...

On September 15, 2022, best-selling author and journalist Kristen Green joined Dr. Carolivia Herron to discuss the subject of Green’s book and Herron’s ancestor, Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who liberated an infamous slave jail and transformed it into one of the nation’s first HBCUs. "The Devil's Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated the South's Most Notorious Slave...

On September 8, 2022, historian Terry Alford delivered a fascinating lecture about his book, "In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits." Two families, one at the nation’s political summit and one at its theatrical, were bound together in the Civil War period by their fascination with spiritualism. Abraham and Mary Lincoln turned to the seance table when their...

On August 25, 2022, writer Derek Baxter delivered a lecture about his book, "In Pursuit of Jefferson: Traveling through Europe with the Most Perplexing Founding Father." In 1788, when two young countrymen asked Thomas Jefferson for advice on where to go on their own journey, he wrote them a 5,000-word letter he entitled Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe, instructing them where to go,...

In this August 11, 2022 lecture, Catherine Ingrassia explores the fascinating research from her book, “Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750.” Indentured servitude was common in colonial America. When voluntary, it allegedly offered dispossessed British subjects the opportunity to improve their situation after their term. However, the practice of kidnapping or “spiriting away” peop...

Was the American Revolution really a revolution? Was George Washington a great general? Was the American victory a miracle or inevitable? Dr. Joseph Ellis explores these questions and more in his lecture on July 20, 2022, about "The Cause," complicating conventional narratives to present a richly nuanced vision of this foundational moment in American history. A landmark work of narrative h...

On July 14, 2022, historian Daniel Thorp delivered a lecture about his book, "In The True Blue’s Wake: Slavery and Freedom among the Families of Smithfield Plantation." In 1759, William Preston purchased sixteen enslaved Africans brought to Maryland aboard the True Blue, an English slave ship. Over the next century, the Prestons enslaved more than 200 individuals and used their labor to es...

Transportation was not merely a way to move about the state or country. The ability to travel across the United States became highly restricted as early as the Scott v. Stanford (1857) case, which denied Dred Scott’s claim to freedom and citizenship after relocating from a free to a slave state. Nearly a century later, the Montgomery Bus Boycott helped spark what we now know as the classic phase o...

On July 4, 2022, curator Karen Sherry led a conversation with William and Ann Oppenhimer, long-time collectors and advocates of folk art, as they shared stories about their work in the field and about the objects on view in the VMHC exhibition, "Visionary Virginians: The Folk Art Collection of William and Ann Oppenhimer."

On June 23, 2022, historian Samantha Rosenthal delivered a lecture about an LGBTQ community in Roanoke, Virginia, and how queer people today think about the past and how history lives on in the present. Queer history is a living practice. Talk to any group of LGBTQ people today, and they will not agree on what story should be told. In her book "Living Queer History," Samantha Rosenthal tel...

On June 16, 2022, authors Jan Meck and Virginia Refo delivered a thoughtful talk and discussion about their new book, The Life and Legacy of Enslaved Virginian Emily Winfree. The Life and Legacy of Enslaved Virginian Emily Winfree tells the true story of an African American woman who was the embodiment of courage, love, and determination. Given a small cottage after the Civil War by her former mas...

On April 20, 2022, historian James Horn delivered the 2022 Stuart G. Christian, Jr. Lecture about his 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...

On December 9, 2021, historian Bruce A. Ragsdale presented a lecture about his book, Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery. For more than forty years, George Washington was dedicated to an innovative and experimental course of farming at Mount Vernon, where he sought to demonstrate the public benefits of recent advances in British agriculture. The methods of Briti...

For generations, many have flocked to the shores of southeastern Virginia for its beaches, resorts, and seasonal fun at its many destinations. In this lecture from June 2, 2022, award-nominated nonfiction author and historian Nancy E. Sheppard takes a trip down “Memory Lane” to visit some of the beloved but lost attractions of Hampton Roads, including Buckroe Beach and Ocean View amusement parks....