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Virginia



  • Portraits of 19th C. Black Charlottesville Show Life, Joy

    The University of Virginia has begun to acknowledge the labors of enslaved people who built the campus. John Edwin Mason is curating an exhibition of photographs commissioned by Black Charlottesvillians showing how they saw themselves. 



  • Beneath the Surface of Virginia's History Standards

    by Edward L. Ayers

    Virginia's Department of Education has ignored the guidance of historians and educators in revising the state's K-12 history standards. The example of how political appointees treated the role of African Americans in driving the movement for abolition is a telling example of the inadequate history they want to teach.



  • Third Draft of Virginia History Standards Incorporates Responses to Some Criticisms

    After appointees of Glen Younkin rejected the detailed standards developed in consultation with historians, educators and museum professionals in favor of a stripped-down document with little attention to the history minority groups, a new draft has explicitly mandated discussions of racism in the K-12 curriculum. 



  • New Virginia Governor's Mansion Tour Doesn't Mention Slavery

    "In a shift from a multi-year effort to tell a more complete history of the mansion, visitors won’t be taken to a building next to the mansion where enslaved workers once slept and toiled. And in two tours on Friday, docents made no mention of slavery at all."



  • The Virginia History that Conservatives are Suppressing

    by Kevin M. Levin

    Conservatives appointed by Glenn Youngkin to the state Board of Education are ignoring the important history of the Readjusters—a biracial party that governed in the tumultuous era between the end of Reconstruction and the consolidation of Jim Crow. Students need to know about them. 



  • Teaching Black History in Virginia Just Got Tougher

    Glenn Youngkin's attack on "divisive" history lessons clearly put the wishes of conservative whites at the center of the debate about curriculum. Now, a planned change to increase Black history in Virginia schools is on hold and Black students and families ask why their concerns are unheard. 



  • Facing the Truth in the Land of Lee

    by Laura Brodie

    The controversy over removing Robert E. Lee's portrait from diplomas at Washington and Lee University points to an uncomfortable truth: Lee's historical depiction as handsome has been a visual symbol of the Lost Cause that has contributed to acceptance of the pro-Confederate mythology. 



  • A Neighborly Civil War in Virginia over Street Names

    Leaders of a group of suburban Virginia homeowners who want to change the Confederate-related street names in their community have been accused of being puppets of George Soros and threatened. 



  • Questing for the Past

    by Katherine Churchill

    A nameplate in an 1864 edition of Gawain and the Green Knight led the author to discover the connections between a mythic medieval past and the Lost Cause ideology of Jim Crow Virginia.