Virginia Vignettes

Richard S. Ewell was a Confederate general during the Civil War who apprenticed under Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley before taking charge of the Army of Northern Virginia’s Second Corps after Jackson’s death. Nicknamed Old Bald Head and said to be “blisteringly profane,” Ewell lost a leg at the Second Battle of Manassas and [...]

Mrs. Burton Harrison, also known as Constance Cary Harrison, was a prolific American novelist of the late nineteenth century who came from a prominent Virginia family. As a young woman, she witnessed the destruction of the Civil War and nursed the Confederate wounded in Manassas and Richmond. After the war, Harrison toured Europe, married, and [...]

Sarah Patton Boyle was one of Virginia’s most prominent white civil rights activist during the 1950s and 1960s and author of the widely acclaimed autobiography, The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition (1962). Her efforts began with an awkward and hesitant welcome to the University of Virginia’s first black law student in [...]

A Voyage to the Moon; with Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians was a satirical science fiction novel in the tradition of Jonathan Swift. Published in 1827 under the pseudonym Joseph Atterley, it poked fun at the gullible masses, fashion, useless inventions, and [...]