At the Falls

At the Falls

Author: Marie Tyler-McGraw

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 9780807844762

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A study of nearly four hundred years in the history of Richmond, Virginia, ranges from the first encounters between English colonists and Powhatan to the inauguration of Douglas Wilder, America's first elected African-American governor


Civil War Richmond: The Last Citadel

Civil War Richmond: The Last Citadel

Author: Jack Trammell

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1467145890

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Few American cities have experienced the trauma of wartime destruction. As the capital of the new Confederate States of America, situated only ninety miles from the enemy capital at Washington, D.C., Richmond was under constant threat. The civilian population suffered not only shortage and hardship but also constant anxiety. During the war, the city more than doubled in population and became the industrial center of a prolonged and costly war effort. The city transformed with the creation of a massive hospital system, military training camps, new industries and shifting social roles for everyone, including women and African Americans. Local historians Jack Trammell and Guy Terrell detail the excitement, and eventually bitter disappointment, of Richmond at war.


Richmond

Richmond

Author: Virginius Dabney

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2012-10-05

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 9780813934303

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This book chronicles the growth of this historic community over nearly four centuries from its founding to its most recent urban and suburban developments.


Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction

Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction

Author: Midori Takagi

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2000-06-29

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0813929172

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RICHMOND WAS NOT only the capital of Virginia and of the Confederacy; it was also one of the most industrialized cities south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Boasting ironworks, tobacco processing plants, and flour mills, the city by 1860 drew half of its male workforce from the local slave population. Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction examines this unusual urban labor system from 1782 until the end of the Civil War. Many urban bondsmen and women were hired to businesses rather than working directly for their owners. As a result, they frequently had the opportunity to negotiate their own contracts, to live alone, and to keep a portion of their wages in cash. Working conditions in industrial Richmond enabled African-American men and women to build a community organized around family networks, black churches, segregated neighborhoods, secret societies, and aid organizations. Through these institutions, Takagi demonstrates, slaves were able to educate themselves and to develop their political awareness. They also came to expect a degree of control over their labor and lives. Richmond's urban slave system offered blacks a level of economic and emotional support not usually available to plantation slaves. Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction offers a valuable portrait of urban slavery in an individual city that raises questions about the adaptability of slavery as an institution to an urban setting and, more importantly, the ways in which slaves were able to turn urban working conditions to their own advantage.


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).


Malcolm and Me

Malcolm and Me

Author: Robin Farmer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1684630843

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Philly native Roberta Forest is a precocious rebel with the soul of a poet. The thirteen-year-old is young, gifted, black, and Catholic—although she’s uncertain about the Catholic part after she calls Thomas Jefferson a hypocrite for enslaving people and her nun responds with a racist insult. Their ensuing fight makes Roberta question God and the important adults in her life, all of whom seem to see truth as gray when Roberta believes it’s black or white. An upcoming essay contest, writing poetry, and reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X all help Roberta cope with the various difficulties she’s experiencing in her life, including her parent’s troubled marriage. But when she’s told she’s ineligible to compete in the school’s essay contest, her explosive reaction to the news leads to a confrontation with her mother, who shares some family truths Roberta isn’t ready for. Set against the backdrop of Watergate and the post-civil rights movement era, Malcolm and Me is a gritty yet graceful examination of the anguish teens experience when their growing awareness of themselves and the world around them unravels their sense of security—a coming-of-age tale of truth-telling, faith, family, forgiveness, and social activism.


Virginia State Penitentiary: A Notorious History

Virginia State Penitentiary: A Notorious History

Author: Dale M. Brumfield

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1467137634

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Thomas Jefferson developed the idea for the Virginia State Penitentiary and set the standard for the future of the American prison system. Designed by U.S. Capitol and White House architect Benjamin Latrobe, the "Pen" opened its doors in 1800. Vice President Aaron Burr was incarcerated there in 1807 as he awaited trial for treason. The prison endured severe overcrowding, three fires, an earthquake and numerous riots. More than 240 prisoners were executed there by electric chair. At one time, the ACLU called it the "most shameful prison in America." The institution was plagued by racial injustice, eugenics experiments and the presence of children imprisoned among adults. Join author Dale Brumfield as he charts the 190-year history of the iconic prison.


The Dooleys of Richmond

The Dooleys of Richmond

Author: Mary Lynn Bayliss

Publisher:

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780813939988

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"The story of an Irish Catholic immigrant family who came to Richmond, Virginia, in the nineteenth century and established a large hat manufacturing enterprise, becoming leaders in business, education, politics, and philanthropy in Virginia"--Provided by publisher.


Death and Rebirth in a Southern City

Death and Rebirth in a Southern City

Author: Ryan K. Smith

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2020-11-17

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 142143928X

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This exploration of Richmond's burial landscape over the past 300 years reveals in illuminating detail how racism and the color line have consistently shaped death, burial, and remembrance in this storied Southern capital. Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, holds one of the most dramatic landscapes of death in the nation. Its burial grounds show the sweep of Southern history on an epic scale, from the earliest English encounters with the Powhatan at the falls of the James River through slavery, the Civil War, and the long reckoning that followed. And while the region's deathways and burial practices have developed in surprising directions over these centuries, one element has remained stubbornly the same: the color line. But something different is happening now. The latest phase of this history points to a quiet revolution taking place in Virginia and beyond. Where white leaders long bolstered their heritage and authority with a disregard for the graves of the disenfranchised, today activist groups have stepped forward to reorganize and reclaim the commemorative landscape for the remains of people of color and religious minorities. In Death and Rebirth in a Southern City, Ryan K. Smith explores more than a dozen of Richmond's most historically and culturally significant cemeteries. He traces the disparities between those grounds which have been well-maintained, preserving the legacies of privileged whites, and those that have been worn away, dug up, and built over, erasing the memories of African Americans and indigenous tribes. Drawing on extensive oral histories and archival research, Smith unearths the heritage of these marginalized communities and explains what the city must do to conserve these gravesites and bring racial equity to these arenas for public memory. He also shows how the ongoing recovery efforts point to a redefinition of Confederate memory and the possibility of a rebirthed community in the symbolic center of the South. The book encompasses, among others, St. John's colonial churchyard; African burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom and on Shockoe Hill; Hebrew Cemetery; Hollywood Cemetery, with its 18,000 Confederate dead; Richmond National Cemetery; and Evergreen Cemetery, home to tens of thousands of black burials from the Jim Crow era. Smith's rich analysis of the surviving grounds documents many of these sites for the first time and is enhanced by an accompanying website, www.richmondcemeteries.org. A brilliant example of public history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City reveals how cemeteries can frame changes in politics and society across time.


The Color of Their Skin

The Color of Their Skin

Author: Robert A. Pratt

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 9780813913728

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By choosing this subtler form of defiance, city officials were able, in effect, to stave off integration for nearly two decades. The Color of Their Skin also covers Richmond politics concerning the issue. The clash of conservative idealogues such as James J. Kilpatrick and former governor Mills Godwin with activist black attorneys like Oliver W. Hill and Samuel W. Tucker bred a "conservatively" moderate element that was represented on the Richmond school board by the likes of board president (and later Supreme Court Justice) Lewis F. Powell. Powell attempted to chart a course between the extreme factions, a course that Pratt accurately describes as "tokenism," since only a handful of blacks was ever admitted to Richmond's schools until the 1970 school busing decree. Pratt demonstrates how the impact of school desegregation was felt beyond the schools, in the demographics of the city itself.