Journalist Joe Motheral tells the stories of prominent locals met and interviewed over the course of his long career. People from all over the US and the world move to northern Virginia to be close to the nation's capital, and many people of national importance make their home in the area. There are as many more, born and raised here, who are well known to locals. Become acquainted with a selection of iconic Virginians, with varying personalities and a variety of fulfilling lives. Read about Geraldine Brooks, Roger Mudd and General George C. Marshall, as well as local heroes.
Journalist Joe Motheral tells the stories of prominent locals met and interviewed over the course of his long career. People from all over the US and the world move to northern Virginia to be close to the nation's capital, and many people of national importance make their home in the area. There are as many more, born and raised here, who are well known to locals. Become acquainted with a selection of iconic Virginians, with varying personalities and a variety of fulfilling lives. Read about Geraldine Brooks, Roger Mudd and General George C. Marshall, as well as local heroes.
During his service in the Confederate army, Major General Lafayette McLaws (1821-1897) served under and alongside such famous officers as Robert E. Lee, Joseph E. Johnston, James Longstreet, and John B. Hood. He played a significant role in some of the most crucial battles of the Civil War, including Harpers Ferry, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Despite this, no biography of McLaws or history of his division has ever been published. A Soldier's General gathers ninety-five letters written by McLaws to his family between 1858 and 1865, making these valuable resources available to a wide audience for the first time. The letters, painstakingly transcribed from McLaws's notoriously poor handwriting, contain a wealth of opinion and information about life and morale in the Confederate army, Civil War-era politics, the Southern press, and the impact of war on the Confederate home front. Among the fascinating threads the letters trace is the story of McLaws's fractured relationship with childhood friend Longstreet, who had McLaws relieved of command in 1863. John Oeffinger's extensive introduction sketches McLaws's life from his beginnings in Augusta, Georgia, through his early experiences in the U.S. Army, his marriage, his Civil War exploits, and his postwar years.
To most history travelers, Virginia is the Civil War. It is the state where the Battles of Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, the Wilderness, and Manassas took place. The city of Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. Appomattox saw the surrender of Lee to Grant. The campaigns that were fought here were led by some of the war's most visible leaders -- Lee, Jackson, Grant, Meade, Sheridan, Stuart, Mosby.This guide also includes West Virginia, which was created from a section of Virginia early in the war.
Recent scholarship on slavery and politics between 1776 and 1840 has wholly revised historians’ understanding of the problem of slavery in American politics. Contesting Slavery builds on the best of that literature to reexamine the politics of slavery in revolutionary America and the early republic. The original essays collected here analyze the Revolutionary era and the early republic on their own terms to produce fresh insights into the politics of slavery before 1840. The collection forces historians to rethink the multiple meanings of slavery and antislavery to a broad array of Americans, from free and enslaved African Americans to proslavery ideologues, from northern farmers to northern female reformers, from minor party functionaries to political luminaries such as Henry Clay. The essays also delineate the multiple ways slavery sustained conflict and consensus in local, regional, and national politics. In the end, Contesting Slavery both establishes the abiding presence of slavery and sectionalism in American political life and challenges historians’ long-standing assumptions about the place, meaning, and significance of slavery in American politics between the Revolutionary and antebellum eras. Contributors: Rachel Hope Cleves, University of Victoria * David F. Ericson, George Mason University * John Craig Hammond, Penn State University, New Kensington * Matthew Mason, Brigham Young University * Richard Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology * James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia * Robert G. Parkinson, Shepherd University * Donald J. Ratcliffe, University of Oxford * Padraig Riley, Dalhousie University * Edward B. Rugemer, Yale University * Brian Schoen, Ohio University * Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University, Camden * George William Van Cleve, University of Virginia * Eva Sheppard Wolf, San Francisco State University
cent Speak Now Against the Day. His book is a stunning achievement: a sprawling, engrossing, deeply moving account of those Southerners, black and white, who raised their voices to challenge the South's racial mores. . . . (This) is an eloquent and passionate book, and . . . one we cannot afford to forget".--Charles B. Dew, New York Times Book Review.
A witness who brings remarkable life and color to the Civil War in the East Robert Hubard was an enlisted man and officer of the 3rd Virginia Cavalry in the Army of Northern Virginia (CSA) from 1861 through 1865. He wrote his memoir during an extended convalescence spent at his father’s Virginia plantation after being wounded at the battle of Five Forks on April 1, 1865. Hubard served under such Confederate luminaries as Jeb Stuart, Fitz Lee, Wade Hampton, and Thomas L. Rosser. He and his unit fought at the battles of Antietam, on the Chambersburg Raid, in the Shenandoah Valley, at Fredericksburg, Kelly’s Ford, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Bristoe Station, and down into Virginia from the Wilderness to nearly the end of the war at Five Forks. Hubard was like many of his class and station a son of privilege and may have felt that his service was an act of noblesse oblige. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, he was a keen observer and a writer of unusual grace, clarity, humor, and intelligence. The editor has fleshed out his memoir by judicious use of Hubard’s own wartime letters, which not only fill in gaps but permit the reader to see developments in the writer’s thinking after the passage of time. Because he was a participant in events of high drama and endured the quotidian life of a soldier, Hubard’s memoir should be of value to both scholars and avocational readers.
George Mason (1725-92) is often omitted from the small circle of founding fathers celebrated today, but in his service to America he was, in the words of Thomas Jefferson, "of the first order of greatness." Jeff Broadwater provides a comprehensive account of Mason's life at the center of the momentous events of eighteenth-century America. Mason played a key role in the Stamp Act Crisis, the American Revolution, and the drafting of Virginia's first state constitution. He is perhaps best known as author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, a document often hailed as the model for the Bill of Rights. As a Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Mason influenced the emerging Constitution on point after point. Yet when he was rebuffed in his efforts to add a bill of rights and concluded the document did too little to protect the interests of the South, he refused to sign the final draft. Broadwater argues that Mason's recalcitrance was not the act of an isolated dissenter; rather, it emerged from the ideology of the American Revolution. Mason's concerns about the abuse of political power, Broadwater shows, went to the essence of the American experience.
With Explorer’s Guides, expert authors and helpful icons make it easy to locate places of extra value, family-friendly activities, and excellent restaurants and lodgings. Regional and city maps help you get around and What’s Where provides a quick reference on everything from tourist attractions to off-the-beaten-track sites. Virginia is for lovers—lovers of history, the outdoors, sport, and fine food! Hike and kayak at Belle Isle State Park; soak up Revolutionary history in Colonial Williamsburg; sample Piedmont wines and Eastern Shore crab cakes; or visit Arlington National Cemetery. From ocean to mountains, wildlife sanctuaries to caves, Virginia’s joys are endless.
