Virginia Vignettes

Anne Spencer was a Lynchburg poet, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. While fewer than thirty of her poems were published in her lifetime, she was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and only the second African American poet to be included in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. Noted for verse preoccupied with [...]

Few United States Supreme Court decisions are as infamous as Buck v. Bell (1927). In Buck, the court affirmed the constitutionality of a 1924 law empowering Virginia to sterilize individuals deemed genetically “unfit.” State authorities had ordered the sterilization of seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck, the illegitimate daughter of a woman the state had already deemed to [...]

The Confederate spy did what many other spies did: she hid in floorboards, spied through peep holes, and made daring horseback dashes through the night. But what really excited the public’s imagination was Boyd’s extraordinary ability, in the words of historian Elizabeth D. Leonard, to “compel even apparently invulnerable men in blue to disclose precious [...]

Belle Boyd was one of the most famous Confederate spies during the Civil War, repeatedly and under dangerous circumstances managing to relay information on Union troop strengths and movements to Confederate commanders in the field. According to Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, the intelligence she provided helped the general to win victories in the Shenandoah Valley [...]