Virginia Vignettes

Nature has often shaped Virginia’s modern history; the Chestnut Blight of the early twentieth century offers one example. Prior to the blight, southern Virginian mountain communities gathered and sold chestnuts, included them in their diet, and used them as animal feed. They also used the trees, as environmental scholar Ralph Lutts has noted, “in log [...]

James H. Price was a governor of Virginia (1938–1942) who advocated for a series of progressive policies designed to help those hurt by the Great Depression of the 1930s. His most notable achievement came in 1938 with the enactment of an Old Age Assistance Plan that enabled Virginians to receive federal Social Security benefits. Throughout [...]

Virginia’s modern history has been shaped by its nonhuman natural environment. The state’s climate, geology, waterways, fisheries, wildlife population, flora and fauna, and soil content have provided the conditions for economic, cultural, and recreational possibilities across the state.
A review of the state’s bioregions reveals subtle examples of nature acting to shape Virginia’s modern history. Watersheds [...]

The Barter Theater, located in the Blue Ridge highlands of Abingdon, Virginia, was founded by Robert Porterfield in 1933 and designated the State Theater of Virginia in 1946. It is the longest-running professional Equity theater in the nation. (The Actors’ Equity Association is a live-theater labor union.) Opening its doors in the midst of the [...]

The National D-Day Memorial is a congressionally approved national war memorial in Bedford, Virginia, honoring the American GIs who participated in the invasion of France at Normandy on June 6, 1944, during World War II (1939–1945). Dedicated on June 6, 2001, by U.S. president George W. Bush and receiving as many as 100,000 visitors per [...]

In 1951, Barbara Rose Johns, then 16 years old, organized a student walkout at the all-black Moton High School in Farmville to protest the conditions of their education. At Moton, the facilities included tar paper shacks but no gymnasium, no cafeteria, no science laboratories, and no athletic field. The buildings had no plumbing and were [...]

The Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition was held in Norfolk from April 26 to November 30, 1907, and celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown colony by settlers from England. It was one in a series of large fairs and expositions held across the United States that began with the 1893 World’s Columbian [...]

It began as the Belgian Pavilion and was built for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Designed by the Art Nouveau architect Henri Van de Velde, the structure and its distinctive, 161-foot tower were intended to be the centrepiece of a new university back in Belgium. But when the Nazis invaded, the pavilion became [...]

The famed Methodist bishop and Prohibitionist James Cannon Jr. was at one time one of the most powerful Democrats in Virginia. Then, in 1924, he opposed the Democratic presidential candidate Al Smith because of Smith’s wet, immigrant, Catholic supporters who were from, in Cannon’s words, “the sidewalks of New York.” Some charged the bishop with [...]

James Cannon Jr. was a bishop of the southern Methodist Church, a leader of Prohibitionists in Virginia and the nation, and a political activist of such skill and combativeness that he became one of the most famous, and deeply controversial, American figures of the early twentieth century. Best known as a relentless advocate of Prohibition, [...]