The Virginia Landmarks Register, fourth edition, will create for the reader a deeper awareness of a unique legacy and will serve to enhance the stewardship of Virginia's irreplaceable heritage.
This is a history of Norfolk from the time of the first contact between a Spanish sailor and a native American Chiskiack in 1561, to the city's late 20th-century concerns, including pollution of Chesapeake Bay, urban development, traffic in illegal guns, and racial tensions.
Edmund Ruffin (794-1865) is remembered as an innovative American agriculturalist and pioneer in soil chemistry- and as an advocate of Southern secession. Here, published for the first time, are the two surviving volumes of Ruffin's manuscript memoirs, written in 1851 with additions in 1853 and 1855. Unlike Ruffin's diaries begun four years later, Incidents of My Life presents the public man, the Ruffin he wanted outsiders and posteriy to see. The volumes recount his career as a scientific farmer, his writing of An Essay on Calcareous Manures, his editing of the Farmers' Register, and the beginnings of his involvement in reform movements in the 1850s. His recollections were intended as a moral record for his heirs, focusing on himself as a good example. Also included are Ruffin's memoirs of his two daughters who died in 1855 and, as an appendix, his account of the death of his mentor, Thomas Cocke, which are useful sources for mid-nineteenth-century social history.
In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters--Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop--placed their images of modern "new women." Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists. Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted through the gender ideology of the period. This is a work of skillful interdisciplinary scholarship, combining recent insights from feminist art history, gender studies, and social and cultural theory. Drawing on a range of visual and verbal representations as well as biographical and critical texts, Todd balances the historical context surrounding the painters with nuanced analyses of how each artist's image of womanhood contributed to the continual redefining of the "new woman's" relationships to men, family, work, feminism, and sexuality.
This project emerged from conversations between three individuals, Dr. Lawrence Babits (Program in Maritime Studies, ECU), Dr. Nancy White (UNC-Coastal Studies Institute), and Feather Phillips (Pocosin Arts Folk School) in the spring of 2011. This meeting was focused on a very simple question, "how can we work together?" Coincidentally, I had recently become the Interim Program Head at the Coastal Studies Institute (a joint appointment with the Program in Maritime Studies), and was scheduled to teach HIST6835: Advanced Research Methods for Maritime Archaeology (a class for MA students centered on utilizing technology in maritime archaeology and focused on instructing students in utilizing remote sensing instrumentation). It was obvious that with these three organizations in the lead, we could start the process of concurrently researching the largely unexamined Scuppernong River (and adjacent Bull Bay) while also teaching students how to conduct a remote sensing survey. Consequently, I was thrown into the fray. At first I felt some trepidation - after all, not all rivers are the same - not all rivers hold the potential to teach our students about the techniques and technologies at our disposal, and even fewer rivers guarantee us the promise of engaging our intellectual curiosities.