VMHC Lectures

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...

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...

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 se...

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...

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....

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...

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 Mar...

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...

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, an...

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 wante...

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 b...

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, variat...

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 r...

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...

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 thousa...

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...

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, whe...

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 supplyi...

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...

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 e...

On May 25, 2023, author Preston Smith gave a fascinating lecture about his father’s service as the last U.S. pilot accepted into the ranks of the RAF during World War II. In a voice both timeless and distinctly greatest generational, Richmonder Parke F. Smith wrote about being the last U.S. pilot accepted into the ranks of the RAF through their training exchange program at War Eagle Field, Los Ang...

On May 11, 2023, Rachel Beanland gave a lecture about the historical research behind her novel about the Richmond Theater Fire, The House is On Fire. Rachel Beanland’s latest novel, The House Is On Fire, is based on the true story of the 1811 Richmond Theater fire and is already being called “a stunning achievement” by Jeannette Walls and “a propulsive, pulse-pounding read” by Kathleen Grissom. Th...

On May 5, 2023, author Craig S. Chapman spoke about the first overseas deployment of American troops, in which 4,000 colonists (including 400 from Virginia) served in the British Army on a disastrous expedition to the Caribbean. In 1740 Great Britain mounted the largest overseas expedition in its history to that time. The goal was to seize control of Spain’s West Indies possessions during the so-c...

On May 5, 2023, Craig S. Chapman spoke about the first overseas deployment of American troops, in which 4,000 colonists (including 400 from Virginia) served in the British Army on a disastrous expedition to the Caribbean. In 1740 Great Britain mounted the largest overseas expedition in its history to that time. The goal was to seize control of Spain’s West Indies possessions during the so-called W...

On April 27, writer Christopher Graham, delivered a lecture about his book Faith, Race, and the Lost Cause: Confessions of a Southern Church. When a young man enamored with Confederate iconography murdered worshipers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015, the rector at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond called his congregation to examine its own racial history and former identity as the...