African American Heritage • Fellowships • History
This commemorative print celebrates the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution. - Courtesy Library of Congress The 15th Amendment, a Failure? Some New Evidence
The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified February 3, 1870, gave African American men in America the right to vote. It was the third and last of the Reconstruction amendments. While women’s suffrage took another fifty years, the arrival of African American men at the polls promised a dramatic change in politics and society. Historians have long wrestled […]
African American Heritage • Fellowships • History
William Ludwell Sheppard, I Carried Him Home, Marse Charlie, undated. The Valentine, Richmond Loyal Artists, Loyal Slaves
Confederate Artists in Civil War Richmond
Watch this free public talk by Rachel Stephens, Associate Professor of Art History, American Art and Architecture at the University of Alabama. Much can be gleaned about the role of art in 19th-century society by looking at the pro-slavery, Confederate-supporting artists. In the years leading up to the Civil War, several Richmond artists were producing […]
Fellowships • History • News
The Sea Venture crashes into an outcropping of rock. Detail from Map of Barmudas by William Janzon Blaeu - Image courtesy The Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia Jamestown & Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’
A Q&A with Hannah Wojciehowski
By Nora Pehrson Hannah Wojciehowski is a Virginia Humanities Fellow in Residence this fall researching the connection between the Virginia Company’s venture in Jamestown and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Hannah teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, where she is Arthur J. Thaman and Wilhelmina Doré Thaman Professor of English. Her interests outside of Shakespeare are […]
Culture & Identity • Fellowships • History
Philip Mills Herrington at Birdsville Plantation Desperately Seeking Scarlett
Searching for Tara in the Land of Gone with the Wind
Since the release of Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel in 1936 and its blockbuster film adaptation three years later, Gone with the Wind has sparked a desire to find Tara, the fictional home of Scarlett O’Hara. In this presentation, Virginia Humanities Fellow Philip Mills Herrington, will guide you through the physical and imagined spaces of “finding […]
African American Heritage • Culture & Identity • Fellowships
Creative Commons image courtesy Flickr user Bethany Khan Singing the Nation Into Being
The ‘Black National Anthem’ and the Politics of Performance
What can videos and metadata tell us about Black subjectivities, nation, and diaspora? What might we gain by considering performances as part of an ephemeral archive? Virginia Humanities Fellow Sonya Donaldson (New Jersey City University) will discuss a digital humanities project she’s working on that curates performances of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and […]
Fellowships • History • News
Virginia Humanities Fellow Karen Chase - Photo Courtesy of Karen Chase Eliza! Eliza!
One Virginia Woman's Role in America's Founding - A Q&A with Karen Chase
By Nora Pehrson Karen Chase is a 2019 Virginia Humanities Fellow in residence at the Library of Virginia in Richmond. She is working on a forthcoming book, Eliza! Eliza! A work of historical nonfiction, it will tell the oft-forgotten stories of two real women—Eliza House Trist and Eliza Lucas Pinckney—and their contributions to America’s founding. […]
Books & Literature • Fellowships • History
Painting by J. W. Waterhouse: "Miranda, a character in 'The Tempest', a play by William Shakespeare" Hunger
The Jamestown Background of Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Join us in Charlottesville when Virginia Humanities Fellow Hannah Wojciehowski (University of Texas at Austin) will consider the evidence that Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” may have its roots in Jamestown. In 1609, the Sea Venture, the flagship of a resupply mission sailing to Jamestown, was caught in a hurricane and ran aground at Bermuda, then an uninhabited […]
Culture & Identity • Fellowships
Photo courtesy April Manalang The Cultural Cost of Unbelief
What Irreligiosity Means to Minority Millennials in the 21st Century
Aprilfaye Manalang teaches Interdisciplinary Studies and research methods at Norfolk State University. Her current research project seeks to investigate how minority millennials perceive, interpret, and construct unbelief: put short, why are minority millennials leaving the church? Moreover, she wants to learn how that unbelief influences their civic engagement and political outcomes, and how it is […]
Culture & Identity • Fellowships • News
Photo courtesy April Manalang Minority Millennials and the Rise of “Religious Nones”
A Q&A with April Manalang
By Nora Pehrson April Manalang is an assistant professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Norfolk State University, where she teaches classes on citizenship, race, religion, and immigration. As a Virginia Humanities Resident Fellow, Manalang spent this summer researching the decline of churchgoing in minority millennial populations. In 2016, she spent time with Virginia Humanities researching Filipino-American […]
