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On January 11, 2024, historian John Reeves gave a lecture on the rise of Ulysses S. Grant during an extraordinary decade. Captain Ulysses S. Grant, an obscure army officer who resigned his commission in 1854, rose to become general-in-chief of the United States Army in 1864. What accounts for this astonishing turn-around? Was it destiny? Or was he just an ordinary man, opportunistically benefiting from the turmoil of the Civil War to advance to the highest military rank? Grant’s life story is an almost inconceivable tale of redemption within the context of his fraught relationships with his antislavery father and his slaveholding wife. His connection to the institution of slavery, before and during the war, will be reconsidered in this talk. John Reeves has been a teacher, editor, and writer for more than thirty years. The Civil War, in particular, has been his passion since he first read Bruce Catton’s The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War as an elementary school student in the 1960s. He is the author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case against an American Icon, A Fire in the Wilderness: The First Battle Between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and Soldier of Destiny: Slavery, Secession, and the Redemption of Ulysses S. Grant. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On December 14, 2023, historian John Ragosta gave a lecture on Patrick Henry’s final political battles. In a democracy, how do you disagree with government policy? What is a loyal opposition? In the 1790s, hyper-partisan political battles threatened to tear the new nation apart. Under the Sedition Act, a person criticizing the government could be jailed; opposition newspaper editors were targeted. In response, the Kentucky Resolutions, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, declared that Kentucky could proclaim federal laws unconstitutional and “nullify” them—secession, state versus state, and against the federal government, loomed. Newspapers warned of “Civil War!” George Washington begged Patrick Henry to come out of retirement, oppose these dangerous policies, and save the union. Though Henry had been the leading antifederalist, arguing against ratification of the Constitution, in 1799, he rebuked Jefferson and insisted that since “we the people” adopted the Constitution—even though Henry had opposed it—anyone contesting federal policy must seek reform “in a constitutional way.” Henry helped to define a loyal opposition. Unfortunately, that story was suppressed by Jeffersonians throughout the 19th century. John Ragosta discussed this story—recounted in For the People, For the Country: Patrick Henry’s Final Political Battle—a story of how a democracy must work if it is to survive. John A. Ragosta is a historian at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. He is the author of Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed and For the People, For the Country: Patrick Henry’s Final Political Battle. This program, part of the VMHC's multi-year initiative to commemorate the 250th Anniversary of the U.S., is presented by the John Marshall Center for Constitutional History & Civics. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On November 30, 2023, historian Jessica Taylor discussed the subject of her new book, Plain Paths and Dividing Lines: Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. It is one thing to draw a line in the sand but another to enforce it. This talk follows the Native peoples and the newcomers who, in pursuit of freedom or profit, crossed emerging boundaries—fortifications, law, property lines—surrounding developing English plantations in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake Bay. Algonquians had cultivated ties to one another and others beyond the region by canoe and road for centuries. Their networks continued to define the watery Chesapeake landscape, even as Virginia and Maryland planters erected fences, policed unfree laborers and Native neighbors, and dispatched land surveyors. Using Native trade routes and places, and sometimes with the help of Native people themselves, escaping indentured and enslaved people absconded fueled by their own developing, alternate ideas about freedom and connection. Taylor talks about how Native land provided the perfect setting for early resistance to colonialism, and about exciting new efforts to document their escapades. Dr. Jessica Taylor is an assistant professor in the history department at Virginia Tech. As a public historian, she collaborates on projects across the Southeast as diverse as oral histories with boatbuilders, augmented reality tours of historic sites, and reconstructed maps of precolonial landscapes. Her current work connects graduate and undergraduate students to history firsthand through fieldwork experiences in oral history, and an ongoing project documenting escape attempts of indentured servants and enslaved people in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake. She is the author of Plain Paths and Dividing Lines: Navigating Native Land and Water in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On October 24, 2023, Maj. Gen. Jason Q. Bohm, USMC, gave a lecture on the formation of the Marine Corps and its role in the American Revolution. The fighting prowess of united states marines is second to none, but few know of the Corps’ humble beginnings and what it achieved during the early years of the American Revolution. Jason Bohm rectifies this oversight with his eye-opening Washington’s Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775–1777. Bohm artfully tells the story of the creation of the Continental Marines and the men who led them during the parallel paths followed by the Army and Marines in the opening years of the war and through the early successes and failures at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, Canada, Boston, Charleston, and more. Washington’s Marines is the first complete study of its kind to weave the men, strategy, performance, and personalities of the Corps’ formative early years into a single compelling account. Maj. Gen. Jason Q. Bohm is a Marine with more than 30 years of service. An infantryman by trade, he has commanded at every level from platoon commander to commanding general in peacetime and war. Bohm also served in several key staff positions, including as a strategic planner with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Director of the Marine Corps Expeditionary Warfare School, House Director, Marine Corps Office of Legislative Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, and Chief of Staff of U.S. Naval Striking and Support Forces, NATO. Bohm has a bachelor’s degree in marketing, a master’s degree in military studies, and a master’s degree in national security studies. Jason has written several articles for the Marine Corps Gazette and won various writing awards from the Marine Corps Association. He is the author of From the Cold War to ISIL: One Marine’s Journey and Washington’s Marines: The Origins of the Corps and the American Revolution, 1775–1777. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On November 8, 2023, award-winning author Edward Ayers delivered a lecture about his book, "American Visions: The United States, 1800–1860." The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest. Edward L. Ayers’s rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs. Lydia Maria Child condemned the racism of her fellow northerners at great personal cost. Melville and Thoreau, Joseph Smith and Samuel Morse all charted new paths for America in the realms of art, nature, belief, and technology. Ayers turns his distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today. Edward Ayers is university professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. He has received the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes for his scholarship, been named National Professor of the Year, received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama at the White House, served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and was the founding board chair of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond. He is executive director of New American History and Bunk, dedicated to making the nation’s history more visible and useful for a broad range of audiences. This lecture was co-hosted by American Civil War Museum, Black HIstory Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia, and The Valentine. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On September 21, 2023, Viola Franziska Müller gave a virtual-only lecture about her book, Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South. Viola Franziska Müller examines runaways who camouflaged themselves among the free Black populations in Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans, and, particularly discussed in this lecture, Richmond. In the urban South, they found shelter, work, and other survival networks that enabled them to live in slaveholding territory, shielded and supported by their host communities in an act of collective resistance to slavery. Though all fugitives risked their lives to escape slavery, those who fled to southern cities were perhaps the most vulnerable of all. Not dissimilar to modern-day refugees and illegal migrants, runaway slaves who sought refuge in the urban South were antebellum America's undocumented people, forging lives free from bondage but without the legal status of freedpeople. Spanning from the 1810s to the start of the Civil War, Müller reveals how urbanization, work opportunities, and the interconnectedness of free and enslaved Black people in each city determined how successfully runaways could remain invisible to authorities. Viola Franziska Müller is a historian at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at University of Bonn, Germany. She received her PhD from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in 2020. Studying the history of U.S. slavery and free people of African descent in Europe, she is particularly interested in the legacies of slavery and the trajectories of racism. She is the author of Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On September 14, 2023, Greg May discussed his eye-opening new book, A Madman's Will: John Randolph, Four Hundred Slaves, and the Mirage of Freedom, about a sensational antebellum Virginia will that freed almost 400 people from slavery. John Randolph of Roanoke—one of Virginia’s best-known statesmen—was a relentless defender of the slave states’ rights, so his deathbed declaration that he wanted to free the people he enslaved took nearly everyone by surprise. But it soon emerged that Randolph had left inconsistently written wills. His lifetime of eccentric behavior gave his heirs ample room to claim that none of Randolph’s wills was valid because he had been mad. The resulting litigation took twelve years. It gives us vivid insights into the intimate lives of antebellum Virginians and a wholly unexpected look at how Virginia’s courts dealt with questions concerning slavery. Although the courts ultimately upheld the will that freed Randolph’s slaves, the story does not have a happy ending. Virginia law required the new freedmen to leave the state, and before they could settle 3000 acres purchased for them in western Ohio, a mob of angry white farmers drove them away. Gregory May is a historian who writes about the early American republic. He graduated from William and Mary and Harvard Law School, clerked for Justice Powell on the United States Supreme Court, and then practiced law for thirty years. He is the author of Jefferson’s Treasure, a political biography of Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On September 7, 2023, historians Lindsay Chervinsky, Matthew Costello, and Jeffrey Engel gave a lecture about how different generations and communities have eulogized and remembered U.S. presidents since 1799. The death of a chief executive, regardless of the circumstances—sudden or expected, still in office or decades later—is always a moment of reckoning and reflection. Mourning the Presidents brings together renowned and emerging scholars to examine how different generations and communities of Americans have eulogized and remembered U.S. presidents since George Washington’s death in 1799. Over twelve individually illuminating chapters, this volume offers a unique approach to understanding American culture and politics by uncovering parallels between different generations of mourners, highlighting distinct experiences, and examining what presidential deaths can tell us about societal fissures at various critical points in the nation’s history, right up to the present moment. This moderated conversation will feature Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University; Dr. Matthew Costello, Vice President and Interim Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association; and Dr. Jeffrey Engel, Professor and Director for the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On August 17, 2023, historian Dr. Michael Lawrence Dickinson discussed his book on the Atlantic slave trade and how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities. In Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, Dr. Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean. The study adopts the perspectives of those enslaved to reveal that, in the eyes of the enslaved, the distinctions were often of degree rather than kind as cities throughout the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience. The tenets of subjugation remained all too similar, as did captives’ need to stave off social death and hold on to their humanity. Almost Dead argues that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth: the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives individually and collectively after forced exportation from West Africa. This was an active process of cultural remembrance, continued resistance, and communal survival. It was in these urban slave communities―within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk―that the enslaved found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by Black lives. Dr. Michael Lawrence Dickinson is an associate professor of African American history at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was a 2019–20 Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His research interests include enslaved Black life, comparative slavery, Black Atlantic studies, and urban history. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On August 3, 2023, Mills Kelly gave a lecture about his book, Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail. For over two decades, hikers on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia walked through some of the most beautiful landscapes of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Then, in 1952, the Appalachian Trail Conference moved 300 miles of the trail more than 50 miles to the west. This change was the single largest rerouting of the AT in its long history. Lost in that move were opportunities for hikers to scramble over the Pinnacles of Dan, to sit on Fisher’s Peak and gaze out over the North Carolina Piedmont, or to cross the New River on a flat-bottomed boat called Redbud for a nickel. In his latest book, historian and lifelong AT section hiker Mills Kelly tells the story of a part of the history of the Appalachian Trail that is all but forgotten by hikers, but not by the residents of the southwestern Virginia counties that the trail used to cross. Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail is thus a history of the AT and a story of the power and persistence of historical memory in rural communities once traversed by the AT. Mills Kelly graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in history and George Washington University with a PhD in history. He is a professor of history at George Mason University where he is also the director of Mason’s award-winning Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. He is the author of Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail. You can learn more about Mills on his website, www.millskelly.net. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On July 27, 2023, Dr. James Broomall gave a fascinating presentation on artifacts taken from the battlefields of the Civil War that helped shape the memory of the conflict. From Col. Elmer Ellsworth’s death coat to the shattered tree stump of Spotsylvania, Civil War Americans actively collected and displayed objects of war. These battle pieces appeared in small museums at the turn of the twentieth century to help visitors understand the blasted landscapes from which they came. This talk will explore the lives of artifacts after they were taken from the field of action in order to understand how they informed the construction of memory. Objects with violent histories both contested and confirmed the prevailing discourse of romanticism in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, Americans clung to things connected to death and violence. On the other, Americans projected violence as regenerative to justify bloodshed. Dr. James J. Broomall is an associate professor of history at Shepherd University and the director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War, which promotes a dialogue among popular and academic audiences by integrating scholarship, education, and engagement. He is a cultural historian of the Civil War era and has published many articles and essays in journals and magazines, including Common Place: The Journal of Early American Life, Civil War History, and The Journal of the Civil War Era. James is the author of Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers (2019). He is currently working on a book project titled, “Battle Pieces: The Art and Artifacts of the American Civil War Era,” which explores how historical imagery and military artifacts were used to create representations of violence, war, and death. This lecture is presented in partnership with the Wilton House Museum. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On July 20, 2023, historian and curator Teasel Muir-Harmony gave a lecture on the Apollo program, told through key objects of the Space Age. Project Apollo ranks among the most bold and challenging undertakings of the 20th century. Within less than a decade, the United States leapt from suborbital spaceflight to landing humans on the moon and returning them safely back to Earth. Hundreds of thousands of people helped make these missions possible, while billions more around the world followed the flights. The material legacy of these missions is immense—with thousands of artifacts from rocket engines to spacesuits to the ephemera of life aboard a spacecraft represented in the Smithsonian’s collections. Now, more than fifty years after the last lunar landing, Teasel Muir-Harmony, curator of Apollo collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, reassesses the history of Project Apollo through the most evocative objects of the Space Age. She examines artifacts that highlight how Project Apollo touched people’s lives, both within the space program and around the world. More than space hardware alone, the objects she features reflect the deep interconnection between Project Apollo and broader developments in American society and politics. Dr. Teasel Muir-Harmony is a historian of spaceflight and the curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Her research focuses on the exploration of the Moon, from debates about lunar governance to the use of spaceflight as soft power, the topic of her award-winning book, Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo (2020). She is the author of Apollo to the Moon: A History in 50 Objects (2018) and an advisor to the television series Apollo’s Moon Shot. In addition, Muir-Harmony co-organizes the Space Policy & History Forum and teaches at Georgetown University. The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.