Old Dominion, New Commonwealth
Old Dominion, New Commonwealth

Author: Ronald L. Heinemann

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2008-05-02

Total Pages: 657

ISBN-13: 0813930480

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"On the morning of 26 April 1607, three small ships carrying 143 Englishmen arrived off the Virginia coast of North America, having spent four months at sea.... All hoped for financial success and perhaps a little adventure; as it turned out, their tiny settlement eventually would evolve from colony into a prominent state in an entirely new nation." So begins Old Dominion, New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007 and the remarkable story behind the founding not only of the state of Virginia but of our nation. With this book, the historians Ronald L. Heinemann, John G. Kolp, Anthony S. Parent Jr., and William G. Shade collaborate to provide a comprehensive, accessible, one-volume history of Virginia, the first of its kind since the 1970s. In seventeen narrative chapters, the authors tackle the four centuries of Virginia’s history from Jamestown through the present, emphasizing the major themes that play throughout Virginia history—change and continuity, a conservative political order, race and slavery, economic development, and social divisions—and how they relate to national events. Including helpful bibliographical listings at the end of each chapter as well as a general listing of useful sources and Websites, the book is truly a treasure trove for any student, scholar, or general-interest reader looking to find out more about the history of Virginia and our nation. Timed to coincide with the 2007 quadricentennial, Old Dominion, New Commonwealth will stand as a classic for years to come.

The Organ Thieves
The Organ Thieves

Author: Chip Jones

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1982107545

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks meets Get Out in this “startling…powerful” (Kirkus Reviews) investigation of racial inequality at the core of the heart transplant race. In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a white businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge. The circumstances surrounding his death reflect the long legacy of mistreating African Americans that began more than a century before with cadaver harvesting and worse. It culminated in efforts to win the heart transplant race in the late 1960s. Featuring years of research and fresh reporting, along with a foreword from social justice activist Ben Jealous, “this powerful book weaves together a medical mystery, a legal drama, and a sweeping history, its characters confronting unprecedented issues of life and death under the shadows of centuries of racial injustice” (Edward L. Ayers, author of The Promise of the New South).

Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment
Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment

Author: James C. Thompson

Publisher:

Published: 2015-12-15

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781943642557

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Readers who know the last new Thomas Jefferson, the one who appeared in the mid-20th century, will not recognize the man portrayed in this colorful book. Not only is the image different, the man who became enlightened in France is also different. This is the real man. "Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment: Paris - 1785" is a new kind of history. I call it a non-fiction narrative. It does not describe what Jefferson did in France. It takes the reader along as Jefferson does it. The reader comes to know the real man during eight divertissements in which French savant Pierre Cabanis shows the American Ambassador the city's most famous sites and buildings. In the course of these expeditions, Cabanis introduces his companion to the French Enlightenment.This knowledge is essential to Jefferson. The self-described "savage from the mountains of America" had gone went to France after the death of his wife to begin his life again. His plan was to become a new man in the form of a recent acquaintance, the marquis de Chastellux. To accomplish this transformation, Jefferson had not only to change his attire and his manners. He also had to learn the language of the French salons, which he intended to join.While accompanying Cabanis and Jefferson on their excursions through Paris in the summer of 1785, the reader sees a real person meeting real Frenchmen and learning to respond to them as a French sophisticate would do. With Cabanis' help, Jefferson grasped the French concept of Progress and came to see himself as its agent. This knowledge prepared him for the contest that lay ahead. Within a year of his return home, with the hepe of his Virginia neighbor, James Madison, he laid the foundations for a political party that would compete for power in America's first national campaign. During this ten-year process - Jefferson later referred to is as "the Second American Revolution" - the political loner who drafted the Declaration of Independence disappeared. Taking his place was an ambitious political partisan whose aim was to become the President of the United States of America.

Commonwealth Catholicism
Commonwealth Catholicism

Author: Gerald P. Fogarty

Publisher:

Published: 2017-07-31

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780268070649

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Commonwealth Catholicism is the first comprehensive history of the Catholic Church in the State of Virginia. Distinguished historian Gerald P. Fogarty tells the story of Virginia's Catholics in the state's history, from the colonial period to the present. Using archival resources, Fogarty brings to life the events and characters that comprise the Church's colorful and often turbulent history. Catholics in Virginia, as in other parts of the South, were a tiny minority from the beginning and remained so for much of their history. They gathered into small, isolated communities, often without a resident priest. The Catholic population in Virginia was so small, in fact, that there was only one diocese until 1974. Catholics were often suspected of unpatriotic sympathies by their Protestant neighbors and tried to remain unnoticed, blending in, as far as possible, with the prevailing Protestant culture. Full religious tolerance for Virginia Catholics did not come until the Revolution. Reconstructing the available documentary evidence, Fogarty tells the story of these early communities in full detail. Fogarty also brings to life many of the prominent actors in the unfolding drama. Father Matthew O'Keefe, the pastor of the Norfolk region from 1852 until 1886--a period of intense Know Nothing activity--is one example. O'Keefe was asked by two men calling at the rectory door to minister to a dying man. Reaching the Elizabeth River on the edge of Portsmouth, Virginia, the two said that the dying man lay further on. O'Keefe "took a pair of revolvers from his coat, placed the men under citizen's arrest, and marched them into Portsmouth where he turned them over to the sheriff. They subsequently confessed that they had been hired to assassinate him." Commonwealth Catholicism, a considerable accomplishment from one of the most prominent historians of American Catholicism, will remain for many years the definitive study on the subject of Virginia's Catholic heritage.

Voices of Freedom
Voices of Freedom

Author: Henry Hampton

Publisher: Bantam

Published: 2011-08-03

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 0307574180

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“A vast choral pageant that recounts the momentous work of the civil rights struggle.”—The New York Times Book Review A monumental volume drawing upon nearly one thousand interviews with civil rights activists, politicians, reporters, Justice Department officials, and others, weaving a fascinating narrative of the civil rights movement told by the people who lived it Join brave and terrified youngsters walking through a jeering mob and up the steps of Central High School in Little Rock. Listen to the vivid voices of the ordinary people who manned the barricades, the laborers, the students, the housewives without whom there would have been no civil rights movements at all. In this remarkable oral history, Henry Hampton, creator and executive producer of the acclaimed PBS series Eyes on the Prize, and Steve Fayer, series writer, bring to life the country’s great struggle for civil rights as no conventional narrative can. You will hear the voices of those who defied the blackjacks, who went to jail, who witnessed and policed the movement; of those who stood for and against it—voices from the heart of America.

A Guidebook to Virginia's African American Historical Markers
A Guidebook to Virginia's African American Historical Markers

Author: Department of Historic Resources

Publisher:

Published: 2019-07-26

Total Pages: 112

ISBN-13: 9780578475417

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Virginia encompasses "this nation's longest continuous experience of Afro-American life and culture," esteemed scholar Armstead L. Robinson has written. This book offers both highway and armchair travelers the first published guide to the locations and texts of more than three hundred state historical highway markers recalling significant people, places, and events in Virginia's African American history. Published to coincide with the 2019 commemoration of the first documented arrival of Africans to present-day Virginia in 1619, A Guidebook to Virginia's African American Historical Markers showcases topics of state and national significance, spanning the colonial era through the mid-1960s and the civil rights movement. Nearly all of these markers were approved by the Virginia Board of Historic Resources within the past forty years, through early 2019, thereby enlarging the sweep and scope of the nation's oldest statewide historical highway marker program.

Fulfilling the Promise
Fulfilling the Promise

Author: John T. Kneebone

Publisher:

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9780813944821

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Founded in Richmond in 1968, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) began with a mission to build a university to serve a city emerging from the era of urban crisis--desegregation, white flight, political conflict, and economic decline. The product of the merger of the Medical College of Virginia and the Richmond Professional Institute combined into one, state-mandated institution, the two were able to embrace their mission and work together productively. In Fulfilling the Promise, John Kneebone and Eugene Trani tell the intriguing story of VCU and the context in which the university was forged and eventually thrived. Although VCU's history is necessarily unique, Kneebone and Trani show how the issues shaping it are common to many urban institutions, from engaging with two-party politics in Virginia and African American political leadership in Richmond, to fraught neighborhood relations, the complexities of providing public health care at an academic health center, and an increasingly diverse student body. As a result, Fulfilling the Promise offers far more than a stale institutional saga. Rather, this definitive history of one urban state university illuminates the past and future of American public higher education in the post-1960s era.