VFH Blogs

The Confessions of Nat Turner

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:49:03 +0000

The Confessions of Nat Turner (cover)" src="http://vfhblogs.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/12/ConfessionsofNatTurner-202x300.jpg" alt="" width="202" height="300" />The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel by William Styron, was published in 1967 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968. The title character is based on the historical Nat Turner, a slave preacher and self-styled prophet who, in August 1831, led the only successful slave revolt in Virginia’s history, which in just twelve hours left fifty-five white people in Southampton County dead. (A slave named Gabriel conspired to revolt in 1800, but his plans were discovered before he could carry them out.)

The historical Nat Turner, in turn, is largely the product of “The Confessions of Nat Turner, as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray,” a pamphlet published shortly after Turner’s trial and execution in November 1831. Although it played a crucial role in shaping perceptions of the event around the central figure of Turner, the pamphlet itself only reached a small portion of the reading public.

The story awaited the Virginia-born Styron, who translated the historical record into a popular medium that commanded the full attention of the reading public and the national media.

Despite its awards, however, that attention was not always positive. Published at the height of the Black Power movement and after a long summer of race riots in the United States, Styron’s novel was labeled by some civil rights activists as racist, especially because of the author’s depiction of Turner lusting after white women, one of whom he eventually kills.

Read the rest of the story in Encyclopedia Virginia >>

Woman Suffrage in Virginia

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:35:09 +0000

The woman suffrage movement, which sought voting rights for women, began in Virginia as early as 1870. In 1909, its most vocal supporters organized around the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia, which joined with national groups in an effort to change state and local laws and pass an amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was passed in Congress in 1919 and ratified by the states a year later. Virginia, however, delayed its ratification until 1952. By then, women had been voting and, slowly, winning elected office in the state for more than 30 years.

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The Great Awakening in Virginia

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:29:34 +0000

The Dunking of David Barrow and Edward Mintz in the Nansemond River" src="http://vfhblogs.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/12/GreatAwakening-228x300.jpg" alt="" width="228" height="300" />

The Dunking of David Barrow and Edward Mintz in the Nansemond River

Great Awakening was the most significant cultural upheaval in colonial America. The term refers to a series of religious revivals that began early in the eighteenth century and led, eventually, to the disestablishment of the Church of England as the official church during the American Revolution (1775–1783).

Triggered by the preaching of the Anglican itinerant George Whitefield, the Great Awakening began in New England and the Middle Colonies, where thousands converted to an evangelical faith centered on the experience of the “new birth” of salvation. It also featured intense, emotional scenes of penitential sinners and new converts being filled, as they saw it, with the Holy Spirit, with associated outcries, visions, dreams, and spirit journeys.

The Great Awakening’s effects in Virginia developed slowly, beginning early in the 1740s. By the 1760s, evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists were making major inroads among Virginians, and challenging the established church in the colony.

Perhaps the most notable historical result of the Great Awakening in Virginia was the end of the state’s establishment of religion, which was ultimately accomplished through the Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786). The cause of religious freedom was championed politically by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, but it depended on the popular support of legions of evangelicals, especially Baptists.

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Edgar Allan Poe

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:23:28 +0000

Edgar Allan Poe was a poet, short story writer, editor, and critic. Credited by many scholars as the inventor of the detective genre in fiction, he was a master at using elements of mystery, psychological terror, and the macabre in his writing. His most famous poem, “The Raven” (1845), combines his penchant for suspense with some of the most famous lines in American poetry. While editor of the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger, Poe carved out a philosophy of poetry that emphasized brevity and beauty for its own sake. Stories, he wrote, should be crafted to convey a single, unified impression, and for Poe, that impression was most often dread. “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), for instance, memorably describes the paranoia of its narrator, who is guilty of murder. After leaving Richmond, Poe lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York, seeming to collect literary enemies wherever he went. Incensed by his especially sharp, often sarcastic style of criticism, they were not inclined to help Poe as his life unraveled because of sickness and poverty. After Poe’s death at the age of forty, a former colleague, Rufus W. Griswold, wrote a scathing biography that contributed, in the years to come, to a literary caricature. Poe’s poetry and prose, however, have endured.

Read the rest in Encyclopedia Virginia >>

Rita Dove

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:18:48 +0000

Rita Dove is widely regarded as one of America’s finest living poets, having published numerous collections of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Thomas and Beulah (1986). She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 until 1995, the first African American to hold that post; she also was Virginia Poet Laureate from 2004 until 2006. Noted for her craftsmanship—rich, detailed imagery and precise, musical language and form—she has received numerous awards for her poetry and other writing, which includes fiction, essays, drama, and a song cycle. In 1989 she became the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

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Cooking in Early Virginia Indian Society

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:14:49 +0000

Fictiliuvaforu in quibus cibucoquunt (The Beauty of the Earthenware Vessels in Which They Cook Food)" src="http://vfhblogs.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/12/CookinginEarlyVAIndianSociety-300x204.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="204" />Early Virginia Indians hunted, fished, and collected wild grains and berries, which they prepared in various ways. Meats were roasted, while grains and tubers were pounded into ashcakes and then baked.

For many millennia, boiling water was difficult, but by the Late Woodland Period (AD 900–1600), technology had improved among the Powhatan Indians of Virginia such that a large ceramic stew pot became the focus of family eating.Roasted meats, shellfish, and wild berries were all added to the stew, which boiled throughout the day.

Rather than prepare set meals, family members who spent the day gathering food or doing chores added to the stew as able and ate from it as necessary. Wild grains and, later, domesticated corn were harvested and baked into bread.

The Powhatans generally avoided seasonings, including salt, and likely enjoyed food for its texture rather than its flavor. Although the Indians domesticated beans and squash, they ate more corn (maize) than any other crop, sucking unripe ears for their sweet juice, baking cornbread, or roasting it.

They also made cooking wrappers, baskets, and mats out of the husks. What is known of Indian cooking in this period is based on research from paleobotanists and paleozoologists about what wild foods were available, as well as eyewitness accounts from English colonists. Most of these accounts concern the Algonquian-speaking Powhatans, but they likely apply to the speakers of Siouan and Iroquoian languages in Virginia.

Read the rest in Encyclopedia Virginia >>

Pocahontas

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:12:33 +0000

Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, paramount chief of an alliance of Virginia Indians in Tidewater Virginia. An iconic figure in American history, Pocahontas is largely known for saving the life of the Jamestown colonist John Smith and then romancing him—although both events are unlikely to be true.

She did meet Smith several times, sometimes serving as Powhatan’s silent figurehead and a symbolic liaison between the chief and the English colonists; she was not, however, a “princess” or a diplomat in any modern sense.

Sometime around 1610, she married an Indian named Kocoum, and in 1613 she was captured by the English and confined at Jamestown, where she converted to Christianity and married the colonist John Rolfe. The marriage, approved by Powhatan, brought an end to the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–1614) and set the stage for Pocahontas’s visit to London in 1616.

At the request of the Virginia Company of London, she met both King James I and the bishop of London, after which she reunited briefly with Smith. Early in her return voyage to Virginia, she became ill and died at Gravesend in March 1617.

In the centuries since, Pocahontas’s life has slipped into myth, serving to represent Virginia’s early claim to be the foundation-place of America. Many elite Virginians, meanwhile, have tenuously claimed her as a relative, even leading to a “Pocahontas clause” in the Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

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Early Virginia Indian Education

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:04:25 +0000

Vt Matronae Dafamonquepeuc liberos geftant (How the Married Women of Dasamonquepeuc Carry Their Children)" src="http://vfhblogs.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/12/EducationinEarlyVAIndianSociety-300x215.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="215" />Early Virginia Indians educated their children for the purpose of preparing them to be adults. Boys and girls were expected to absorb the community’s values, including stoicism in the face of hardship, and master the skills necessary to survive and thrive.

For men that included hunting and warfare and for women collecting plants, building houses, and making household furnishings. English colonists had little to say about how Indian girls were reared, either out of lack of interest or because such knowledge was considered to be none of their business.

Powhatan boys were trained in hunting and warfare by their fathers and older male relatives in order to win personal names, learn marksmanship, and earn the right to join the hunt. Between the ages of ten and fifteen, they engaged in the several-months-long huskanaw ritual, in which they were ritually—but not actually—killed and then given a drug which turned them briefly violent and ritually erased their memories of boyhood. The English colonists saw this sort of training for boys as frivolous; they believed that boys, instead of girls, should plant and farm.

Although education practices among the Virginia Indians changed in the years after contact with the English, what remained was an ingrained reluctance to send their children outside the family for instruction.

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Virginia’s First Africans

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:56:15 +0000

Virginia’s first Africans arrived at Point Comfort, on the James River, late in August 1619. There, “20. and odd Negroes” from the Dutch ship White Lion were sold in exchange for food and some were transported to Jamestown, where they were sold again, likely into slavery. Historians have long believed these Africans to have come to Virginia from the Caribbean, but Spanish records suggest they had been captured in the Portuguese colony of Angola, in West Central Africa. They probably were Kimbundu-speaking people from the kingdom of Ndongo, and many of them may have been urban dwellers with some knowledge of Christianity. While aboard the São João Bautista bound for Mexico, they were stolen by the White Lion and an English ship, the Treasurer. Once in Virginia, they were dispersed throughout the colony. The number of Virginia’s Africans increased to thirty-two by 1620, but then dropped sharply by 1624, likely because of the effects of disease and the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622–1632). Evidence suggests that many were baptized and took Christian names, and some, like Anthony and Mary Johnson, won their freedom and bought land. By 1628, after a shipload of about 100 Angolans was sold in Virginia, the Africans’ population jumped dramatically. Meanwhile, their experience in West Central Africa cultivating tobacco contributed greatly to the crop’s success in the colony.

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Moton School Strike and Prince Edward County School Closings

VFHwebdev — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:53:39 +0000

On April 23, 1951, students at Robert Russa Moton High School in the town of Farmville, in Prince Edward County, walked out of school to protest the conditions of their education, which they claimed were vastly inferior to those enjoyed by white students at nearby Farmville High School. The strike, led by student Barbara Johns, is considered by many historians to signal the start of the desegregation movement in America and resulted in a court case that was later bundled with other, similar cases into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Brown by mandating public-school desegregation, and Virginia state leaders responded with an official policy of Massive Resistance. When, on January 19, 1959, both a federal and a state court simultaneously ruled the state’s actions unconstitutional, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors closed its public schools rather than integrate them. They stayed shuttered for five years. Another U.S. Supreme Court decision—Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward—finally forced the county’s schools to reopen in 1964.

Read the rest in Encyclopedia Virginia >>