VMHC Lectures

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 look...

On August 24,2017, 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...

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 Vi...

On July 19, 2018, 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 conflicti...

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...

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. Dee...

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 de...

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,...

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 analyt...

All Falling Faiths: Reflections on the Promise and Failure of the 1960s by J. Harvie Wilkinson III Duration: (01:10:23) On March 29, 2017, 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 bo...

On March 16, 2017, 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 th...

On March 2, 2017, 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 t...

On February 9, 2017, 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. Tragic...

On February 22, 2017, 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 L...

On January 18, 2017, 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 Richm...

On January 5, 2017, at noon, Peter Onuf delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “The Private Jefferson: 'Most Blessed of the Patriarchs.'” "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Tracing Jefferson's philosophical development from youth to old age, historian Peter Onuf explores what he calls the "empire" of Jefferson's imagination—an expansive state of mind born of his origins...

On December 10, 2016, Susan R. Stein delivered a Banner Lecture called “Documents and Drawings: 'The Private Jefferson' Examined.” Thomas Jefferson devoted himself to building the new American nation as well as Monticello, his plantation home. At Monticello, he managed his sizable farms, designed the house and its surrounding landscape, and selected art and furnishings. This talk will disc...

On December 8, 2016, Elaine Frantz Parsons delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Horns, Masks, and Women's Dress: How the First Klan Used Costume to Build Domestic Terrorism.” One hundred and fifty years ago, the Ku-Klux Klan became the first broad-based domestic terrorist movement in the United States. Although there was nothing new about white violence against black southerners, the Ku-Klux K...

On December 1, 2016, Robert M. S. McDonald delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Thomas Jefferson, Revered and Reviled.” Of all the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson stood out as the most controversial and confounding. Loved and hated, revered and reviled, during his lifetime he served as a lightning rod for dispute. Few major figures in American history provoked such a polarization of public opin...

On November 10, 2016, Patrick H. Breen delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “Revolt and Repression: Reconsidering the Nat Turner Slave Revolt.” On August 21, 1831, seven men launched what would come to be known as the Nat Turner Revolt. The rebels swept through Southampton Country recruiting slaves to their rank and killing nearly five dozen whites, more than had ever been killed in any slave revol...

On October 20, 2016, Bob Brown and Bill Lohmann delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “On the Back Roads Again: More People, Places, and Pie Around Virginia.” Head out on the back roads of Virginia again with Richmond Times-Dispatch senior photographer Bob Brown and columnist Bill Lohmann as they encounter memorable characters, explore charming places, and search for their next piece of pie in their...

On October 12, 2016, Michael D. Gorman delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “‘A Manner Which Would Not Have Been Permitted Towards Slaves’: Race, Reconstruction, and Memory in Postwar Richmond.” The Civil War in Virginia may have ended at Appomattox, but for those affected by war, additional intense times lay ahead. How did the people of Richmond cope with the sudden influx of paroled prisoners, th...

On October 6, 2016, William Geroux will deliver a Banner Lecture entitled “The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s U-Boats.” In his book, The Mathews Men: Seven Brothers and the War Against Hitler’s U-Boats, author William Geroux uses the experiences of merchant mariners from Mathews County, Virginia, to tell the largely forgotten story of the heroics and sacrifices of the U.S...

On September 22, 2016, Daniel W. Crofts delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "The Paradoxical Emancipator: Abraham Lincoln and the Other Thirteenth Amendment." When Abraham Lincoln spoke so memorably at Gettysburg about “a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he was looking more toward a hoped-for future rather than accurately descri...

On September 8, 2016, Rush Loving Jr., delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "The Well-Dressed Hobo: The Many Wondrous Adventures of a Man Who Loves Trains." America’s railroads have gone through a tumultuous and dramatic era during the past eighty years, and Virginia played a key role through all of it. They were the times of strong, colorful personalities, men like Virginia’s Claytor broth...