This morning a smart young Virginia Humanities intern interviewed me about my job as editor of Encyclopedia Virginia. We talked about the almost twelve years I’ve been working on the project, about the publishing process we’ve built over that time, and the ways we continue to demonstrate the relevance of this history. I have to tell you, it was a bittersweet conversation because this is my last week on the job. Later this month I’ll begin a new position at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation.

I’ve been avoiding writing this blog post because how do you sum up such a long and rewarding experience? How do you find words for how proud you are of what we’ve all created—what we’ve really only just begun to create?

When I started at Encyclopedia Virginia in January 2008, we had assigned and received a few entries, but none were fully edited. Matthew Gibson had already created much of the site’s informational infrastructure. He was almost prophetic in this respect, making possible things we hadn’t yet imagined doing. But we were so new we weren’t even online.

Now, as of this morning, we’ve published a few shy of 1,200 entries and a few more than 900 primary documents. This blog has been going for at least a decade and has even managed to make a few waves over the years. And we have completed three seasons of the Not Even Past podcast. A decade ago we never dreamed of doing virtual tours and nowadays they’re almost old hat. Our traffic has gradually risen and I think people are beginning to take notice.

We’ve been on the Daily Show, for crying out loud. I mean, how cool is that?

As I told the intern, all of this work has been part of an effort to rethink how people interact with history. Our incomparable media editor Donna Lucey understands that images and artifacts are crucial to understanding content and she insists on finding only the coolest stuff. Check out this piece of Civil War hardtack, for instance, complete with worm. Or this engraved walrus tusk. Or Washington’s dentures, with their awful history right there for everyone to read.

Peter Hedlund, in his work with Google, has made it possible for users to virtually explore the landscape of Virginia, inside and out. And by transcribing and publishing primary documents, Miranda Bennett allows our readers to dig much more deeply into the history than they could with a more conventional encyclopedia. I will never forget one of our former editors, Michelle Taylor (now Dr. Taylor), working on the Danville Riot entry, and especially the congressional testimony that resulted from the violence. Read it yourself. Listen to a white man named George Lea explain to United States senators that he had felt comfortable barking orders to a black police officer because, “Well, we generally speak that way to that class of people down there. We are in the habit of ordering them …”

Michelle began to see the past, and so the present, a little differently that day. And that’s what the study of history can do. It can change your entire understanding of the world.

Nowadays Miranda also produces the podcast, finding unexpected ways to connect the stories in Encyclopedia Virginia to our day-to-day experiences. She also works with teachers and curriculum experts, conducts oral histories, and remains vigilant over our content—alert to what we’re missing and how we might more effectively present what we have. Our newest colleague, John Rhea, is working on a major new site design, our third.

In the last dozen years, across 1,200 or so entries, we have published amazing content on everything from Virginia Indians to the civil rights movement, from the colonial period to the Civil War and Reconstruction. We were prescient, I think, in undertaking a major section on slavery in Virginia. That was five years ago, and since then scholarship on slavery has become central to the national conversation. Witness our entries on Virginia’s first Africans, indentured servants, Robert E. Lee and slavery, the Lost Cause, and the Lee statue in Charlottesville.

Through this blog, and in essays like this one on the Lee statue and this one on the lynching of John Henry James, I have done my best to think through what this history means. After all, that is what the entire enterprise of history scholarship is about. Not simply collecting agreed-upon facts, but arranging them in some meaningful way.

That we argue about the history only suggests it still matters. And for that I’m grateful.

As I am for all of the help and comradery of my colleagues, past and present—at Virginia Humanities and our partner institutions, especially the Library of Virginia. Thank you to all of the wonderful teachers I’ve met and worked with over the years, and thank you to Caitlin Newman, the best editor I’ve ever known. She’ll be stepping in as interim until a new editor is hired.

I’m proud of what I’ve helped accomplish but I couldn’t have done any of it without you.

I’ll be just across town but my heart will always be here at Encyclopedia Virginia.

On this day in 1607, Christopher Newport and a small company of men began exploring the upper reaches of the James River, where they were feasted by the Indian weroance Ashuaquid. Two years later, a feast would have tasted even better, but relations with the Indians were generally poor and the colony not doing so well. As such, the muckety-mucks at the Virginia Company of London (that’s their seal above) decided on a major rebranding effort that included, on this day in 1609, the rolling out of a brand new charter. It provided for private corporate control—better to instill some discipline!—and extended Virginia’s boundaries all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Below you’ll find the first two pages of the charter, with the names of some of the investors, including the governor, Sir Thomas Gates, and even Oliver Cromwell (not that Oliver Cromwell, but his uncle).

Skipping ahead in time, today is the 188th birthday of Ambrose Everett Burnside, the pride of Liberty, Indiana, and bearded men everywhere. During the Civil War, he led the Union Ninth Corps to triumph at the site of the original Roanoke colonies—okay, it wasn’t much of a triumph, but it weren’t nothing, either—and disaster at Fredericksburg (1862) and the Crater (1864), after which he was sent away to await orders that never came. That’s Ol’ Sideburns on the left down there. On the right is Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession, which was passed by referendum on this day in 1861 by an exact vote (in case you’re interested) of 125,950 to 20,373.

The war at this point was already a fact. On the same day, Union troops occupied the grounds around Arlington House, Robert E. Lee‘s mansion. Within a couple of years, the land would be transformed into Freedmen’s Village, a place for former enslaved people to make an attempt at a new life. These men and women had been using the war as a means to freedom, and in fact it was on this day in 1861 that three enslaved men from Sewell’s Point fled to the safety of Fort Monroe. The Union commander there, Benjamin Franklin Butler, declared them to be “contraband of war,” or property used by the enemy to aid the war effort. In that way he could affect their freedom without breaking any laws.

On this day a year later, in 1862, the Confederate spy Belle Boyd, pride of Martinsburg, spied through a peephole in a closet door and in this way managed to obtain information that aided Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson in his victory at Front Royal. That’s her down there on the left, in a portrait by Kevin Storms, who, like many before him, wonders about her beauty of lack thereof. She did all right in her day, supposedly wooing information out of some Union men and then marrying one of her eventual captors. (Listen to our podcast about all that.)

Finally, on this day in 1951, Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson (entry forthcoming) filed suit on behalf of 117 students and their parents from Robert Russa Moton High School in Prince Edward County. Exactly a month earlier, the students had gone on strike in protest of poor conditions at their all-black school. The case, Dorothy Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Civil Action 1333, was eventually bundled into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, and we all know what happened with that. Courtesy of the National Archives, you can check out the original filing (above right) as well as photographs from the plaintiff and defendants, showing conditions at Moton and a comparable white school in the county.

A version of this post was originally published on May 23, 2012.

We get a fair amount of reader feedback here at Encyclopedia Virginia. For instance, we are still hearing about our entry on the United Daughters of the Confederacy and we recently received a note from a reader who found on our site “Easily the best article on Mary Bowser I’ve come across.” There are a lot of genealogical inquiries, too, and just yesterday someone who wanted to debate the relative quality of two conflicting sources related to Nathaniel Basse.

To be fair, though, most of the emails we receive appear to originate in middle-school classrooms and are some variation on the word “poop.”

Over the weekend an email came in that was more thoughtful. Attached to our entry on slave sales, it wondered whether our treatment of slavery in Virginia told the full story. We are in the third year of a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create content related to slavery in Virginia. And just yesterday we met as a staff to take stock and think more about how we can tell the public about the work that we’ve done.

So I read this with interest:

I have been studying slaves in my family, and I find your perspective doesn’t give the whole story. I also taught black children in an all black northern school, and all they thought about in their heritage were people in shackles. I realize that slavery was a horrible institution, but I wish you would talk about the people who tried to fight against it, even in the midst of it. I wanted to give these children a perspective that some of their ancestors could have in fact been loved. Many white people were trying to get out of owning people, but they had to pay a large fine, and the slave had to leave their family behind. You make it sound so simple. The more I study it, the more complicated it is. But for the sake of the children give the whole story.

I couldn’t agree more about the importance of this history, especially when thinking about that kerfuffle regarding the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Many of the comments seek to minimize and deflect the importance of slavery to the culture of the antebellum South and to the causes of the Civil War. They deploy decontextualized factoids—”Did you know that slaves were captured and sold by their own people?” (Why, yes!)—as weapons in a political war rather than any kind of sincere attempt to understand the period or the people.

Of course, it’s nearly impossible not to get caught up in that political war sometimes, debating people who want to score points rather than those relative few, like our Basse correspondent, who (thankfully) prefer to debate history and its sources.

All of which is to say that when a reader wonders how we might do a better job teaching the nuances of slavery, the violence it inflicted but also the resistance it engendered, we listen.

I suggested to the emailer that she consult our entries on Gabriel’s Conspiracy, Nat Turner’s Revolt, even the little-known Westmoreland Slave Plot, for examples of resistance. It’s true, though, that resistance took many, often non-violent, forms, and we have a scholar working on an entry about that, too. In the meantime, consider Bethany Veney, an enslaved woman who foiled her owner’s attempt at selling her. We just did a podcast about her, and the text of her autobiography is published on our site.

In fact, one of the best ways to dive into the complexities of the lives of enslaved people is by reading their stories—some told directly by them, some mediated by white people. We have published a good number of these, which you can find here.

Our reader wrote back that she “wasn’t talking about resistance necessarily. I was talking about the whole life of slaves. The stories of bravery catch our attention, but to focus on who we might think of as brave leaves us with many life stories untold.”

Again, I couldn’t agree more, and we’ve tried to put a premium on biographical entries of enslaved people, regardless of whether they are traditionally “important” in the way that normally recommends one as the subject of an encyclopedia entry. Hence our entries on Veney, Sally Cottrell Cole, Corinna Hinton, Ann Banks Davis, and John M. Washington, in addition to slightly better known people, such as Angela, Kitty Foster, Henry Martin, Hercules, Oney Judge, Thomas Fuller, Paul Jennings, Gilbert Hunt, Billy, Blind Billy, Jack Ditcher, Joseph Fossett, and Mary Aggie. Not to even mention Sally Hemings.

The stories contained in these names are varied and often astounding. You can engage with them through our entries, through first-person narratives and other primary-source documents, through two- and three-dimensional media objects, virtual tours, and podcasts. Even 3D video.

You can’t understand Virginia without understanding slavery, and I am pleased that, with the NEH’s help, we’ve been able to do our part. And as for our emailer, the more she digs into Encyclopedia Virginia, the happier she seems to be:

“I have read the first two [slave] narratives and I am spell bound. I can’t wait to read more. I am so glad I came across your site.”

IMAGES: an enslaved man named Tom (Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association); watercolor portrait of an enslaved girl by Mary Custis Lee (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

We just dropped season 3 of our podcast Not Even Past. Each episode crafts a short narrative drawn from the encyclopedia, pairing it with an interview with someone connected to the story in some interesting way. This season, we examined the lives of Christopher McPherson, Angela, John Mitchell Jr., Henry Martin, Anne Spencer, and Bethany Veney.

Who are these people? Why do their stories matter today?

Plug in your headphones and give us a listen. Find us here or wherever you get your fine podcasting content.

In Season 3, Episode 6, of Not Even Past, host Brendan Wolfe travels to 1313 Pierce Street, the Lynchburg home of Anne Spencer, a poet, gardener, and luminary of the Harlem Renaissance. What can her home tell us about this accomplished and sometimes eccentric woman? Wolfe and producer Miranda Bennett also sit down with Spencer’s granddaughter, Shaun Hester, who operates the house as a museum.

RESOURCES
Listen to a short radio segment from 2006 about Anne Spencer.
Take a virtual tour of her home.

Click below to read a transcript of the show.

IMAGE: The Anne Spencer House and Garden at 1313 Pierce St., in Lynchburg, in 2009 (Flickr user eli.pousson)

In Season 3, Episode 5, of Not Even Past, host Brendan Wolfe marvels at the power of Bethany Veney‘s writing, which tells the story of her life in slavery, the time she foiled an attempt to sell her, and her journey to freedom. Wolfe and producer Miranda Bennett also talk to Jobie Hill, an architectural historian who reads such narratives in order to better understand the spaces in which enslaved people like Veney lived their lives.

RESOURCES
Read Veney’s autobiography.
View a slideshow of the book’s cover and title page.
Read more about slave sales in Virginia.

Click below to read a transcript of the show.

IMAGE: This portrait of Bethany Veney serves as the frontispiece for her 1889 autobiography. (HathiTrust Digital Library)

In Season 3, Episode 4, of Not Even Past, host Brendan Wolfe considers the life of Henry Martin, a formerly enslaved man who for years worked as a janitor at the University of Virginia. Something of a mascot, something of a joke—that’s how the community treated him but underneath that was a black man just attempting to survive. Wolfe and producer Miranda Bennett interview Edwina St. Rose and Bernadette Whitsett-Hammond, local historians working to maintain the cemetery where Martin is buried and tease out the stories of Charlottesville’s black community.

RESOURCES
Read Martin’s life story, as told to the yearbook Corks and Curls.
Read a faculty member’s memories of Martin.
Read Martin’s obituary in the university’s Alumni Bulletin.
Read Martin’s obituary in the Charlottesville Daily Progress.
Read a newspaper report on Martin’s funeral.
Look at a slideshow of images of Martin at the university.

Click below to read a transcript of the show.

IMAGE: Henry Martin poses on the Lawn of the University of Virginia in April 1896. (University of Virginia Special Collections)

In Season 3, Episode 3, of Not Even Past, host Brendan Wolfe admires the African American newspaperman John Mitchell Jr. Known as the Fighting Editor, Mitchell was willing to strap on a pair of Smith & Wesson revolvers and risk his own death in the fight against lynching. His life ended on a sad note, though, and today he is largely forgotten—or he might have been if not for Kimberly Wilson. A Mitchell relative living in Richmond, she tells Wolfe and producer Miranda Bennett how she keeps his memory alive.

RESOURCES
Look at a newspaper clipping announcing an election victory for Mitchell.
Examine a Mitchell campaign button.
Read more about lynching in Virginia.

Click below to read a transcript of the show.

IMAGE: This portrait of John Mitchell Jr. appeared in The Afro-American Press, and Its Editors, by I. Garland Penn, published in 1891. (University of Virginia Library)

In Season 3, Episode 1, of Not Even Past, host Brendan Wolfe introduces us to Christopher McPherson, a free black man who knew Jefferson, dined with Madison, and worked for George Wythe. He also predicted the end of the world. Wolfe and producer Miranda Bennett also interview Deborah Murdock who owns properties where McPherson once worked.

RESOURCES
Read Christopher McPherson’s autobiography.
Read a letter from Madison to Jefferson mentioning McPherson.
Read a letter from Jefferson to Adams mentioning McPherson.
Read a newspaper notice announcing McPherson’s new school.

Click below to read a transcript of the show.

IMAGE: These images, taken by producer Miranda Bennett, are from inside the Fluvanna County house where Christopher McPherson worked.

In Season 3, Episode 2, of Not Even Past, host Brendan Wolfe examines the life of Angela, one of the first twenty Africans to arrive at Jamestown in 1619. On the 400th anniversary of that propitious moment in Virginia history, Historic Jamestowne is looking in earnest for signs of Angela and her fellow Africans. Wolfe and producer Miranda Bennett interview Chardé Reid, an archaeologist working on the site.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Read more about the first Africans in Virginia.
Read more about the transatlantic slave trade.
Read more about Angela’s owner, William Peirce.
Examine a Portuguese map of West Africa.x

Click below to read a transcript of the show.

IMAGE: Two colored engravings from the eighteenth century depict activity off the coast of what is now Ghana. (The Mariners’ Museum)