Category: Virginia history
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Congress, Commission Renounce Reconciliation
by Donald Smith ‘In passing the 2021 William M. “Mac” Thornberry National Defense Authorization Act, the United States Congress determined that Confederates and the Confederacy no longer warrant commemoration through Department of Defense assets.’ *** At such a time and under such conditions I thought it eminently fitting to show some token of our feeling,…
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The Fighting Editor
Alexander, Ann Field. Race Man: The Rise and Fall of the “Fighting Editor” John Mitchell Jr., University of Virginia Press, 2002 Review by Dick Hall-Sizemore John Mitchell, Jr. was a major figure in Richmond and Virginia public affairs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Over the course of this career, he was a…
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Virginia Army National Guard Switches from Red to Blue
by Thomas. M. Moncure Jr. Confederate statues have come down and in some cases – to assure they will never rise again – have been melted down. Schools and roads have been purged of Confederate references. Army bases likewise are renamed in this cultural cleansing. This rewriting of history – Soviet style – would make…
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Daughter of Heroines
by Margot Heffernan The year is 2023 but it feels as if the calendar has rolled back a hundred years for women and girls in Virginia, and just about anywhere else in the Western world. Hyperbolic? Over the top? Sadly, no. Each day women are censored, denigrated, and erased; called bigots for speaking biological fact;…
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A Long Time Ago in a World Far Far Away
by Dick Hall-Sizemore This past weekend I went back in Virginia’s history. Waaaay back. Over a billion years back. The occasion was the 2023 Virginia Geological Field Conference. This is an annual event staged by a group of leading geologists in the state. Attending were faculty members from several institutions, including one community college; geologists…
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A Native Virginian Hero
by Dick Hall-Sizemore A family plot in the cemetery of a church in the Northern Neck completed in 1714 is the final resting place of a Virginia native who was one of the United States’ modern heroes. A highway historic marker caught my eye this weekend while I was exploring the Northern Neck on my…
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Thunder in the Pulpits
by Michael Giere “But this was not always so. In fact, for much of our history, it has been just the opposite. Godly men and women who were fearless, bold, strong, and savvy have been central to the American experience.” There has never been anything in history like the US Constitution, signed on September 17,…
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Revisiting the Intellectual Foundations of Conservatism — One Book at a Time
by Suzanne Munson From time to time, members of every great movement such as American Conservatism need to stop, take a breath, and see where the movement is going. Great movements, founded by great individuals, can sometimes be hijacked by lesser minds. Many of the founders of modern conservatism were intellectuals. William F. Buckley was…
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The Enduring Value of Arlington’s Endangered Monument to Reconciliation
by Donald Smith Jim Webb, former U.S. Senator from Virginia, former Navy Secretary, and certified badass (Navy Cross, Silver Star and two Purple Hearts from his service as a Marine officer in Vietnam) grabbed quite a bit of attention last week. On August 18 he called for the Confederate Memorial at Arlington Cemetery to be…
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Satire: Lexington’s Battle of the Statues
by Thomas Moncure The Virginia Military Institute removed the statue of former Professor (and Confederate General) Thomas J. Jackson from the front of barracks. In doing so they have meekly emulated the sterling example of the City of Richmond and other places. Cleansing the landscape of offensive historical figures is now the touchstone of our…
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Ignorance Erases George Wythe at a Virginia Community College
by Suzanne Munson Virginia Peninsula Community College recently announced the removal of the names of two historic American leaders from its buildings, George Wythe and Dr. Corbin Griffin, a surgeon for Virginia patriot soldiers, presumably because they once owned slaves. It should be noted that these were heroes of the American Revolution, not the Civil…
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Webb’s Last Ditch Attempt to Save the Confederate Memorial at Arlington
by Shaun Kenney Former Virginia Democratic U.S. Senator Jim Webb is begging federal officials to save the last remaining Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery in a forceful op-ed to The Wall Street Journal. Webb writes: [President William] McKinley understood the Civil War as one who had lived it, having served four years in the…
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You’ve Been to Paris but You’ve Never Been to the Luray Caverns?
by Kerry Dougherty Today we’re taking a break from politics, woke culture and indictments. It’s Explore Beautiful Virginia time. A midsummer palate cleanser! But first a question: Why does every tourist destination sell fudge? More precisely, is there some sort of law that mandates every vacation spot feature a “fudgery”? Is there something about salt…
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Ham Cemetery Stands Strong
by Jon Baliles Over in the woods behind Bandy Field Nature Park in the West End along (and overlapping with) the border of Henrico County near the Village Shopping Center, there is a small African-American cemetery with an enormous history that recently appeared in a feature by Bill Pike in the Henrico Citizen; it is…
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The Pettiness of Canceling John S. Mosby
by Donald Smith In April, in Georgia, a correction morphed into an overreaction. As part of the ongoing process to change the names of military bases named for Confederate generals, Fort Benning became Fort Moore. Around the same time, the National Ranger Memorial Foundation (NRMF) responded to a directive from U.S. government officials. The NRMF sent workmen…