With Good Reason

In 1862, poet Walt Whitman went to Fredericksburg, Virginia, searching for his brother George who had been wounded in a Civil War battle. Whitman was so moved by the carnage he found that he worked as a nurse for the rest of the war.   Mara Scanlon and Brady Earnhart (University of Mary Washington) say [...]

To mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, the nation’s finest historians gathered on September 24th at Norfolk State University to discuss the role of race and slavery in the war that cost hundreds of thousands of American lives. With topics including the myth of black Confederates, the quest for black rights in the middle [...]

Dogs are man’s best friend, but why?  It’s a friendship that goes way back – possibly all the way back to prehistoric times.  Dog-owner and forensic scientist Darcy Morey (Radford University) traces the evolution of dogs back 15,000 years to the present and says ancient dog burials are proof that we’ve always had a soft [...]

They are everywhere you look — in the soil, in the ocean, in your backyard.  Bacteriophages.  They’re viruses that infect bacteria, and they could one day be used to fight off drug-resistant strains of bacteria like tuberculosis.   Mark Forsyth, Margaret Saha, and Kurt Williamson (College of William and Mary) lead a group of students into the field [...]

Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, the first Jewish American to reach that rank in the United States Navy, is an unsung hero of American history.  According to Melvin Urofsky (Virginia Commonwealth University), not only was Levy instrumental in the Navy, he also rescued Monticello, the Thomas Jefferson estate, from ruin.  Also featured: David Metzger (Old Dominion [...]

Inter-country adoptions gone awry have a way of capturing headlines.  A missionary group lands in jail after trying to remove children from Haiti.  An American woman puts her seven year-old adopted son on a one-way flight back to Moscow.  Karen Rotabi (Virginia Commonwealth University) has studied this issue in Guatemala and beyond for decades and [...]

Don Quixote, conqueror of windmills and readers’ hearts, was recently voted the best book of all time in a survey of 100 of the world’s best authors.  It’s the tale of a Spanish knight who reads one too many chivalric romances and takes up a rusty breastplate and sword in search of adventures.  Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez [...]

Holding a student’s attention for longer than five seconds is no easy task.  Despite an innate curiosity, children often find classrooms downright boring.  But why?   Daniel Willingham (University of Virginia), a cognitive scientist, believes the trick to keeping young brains engaged in school is to find the perfect level of challenge – not too [...]

Female tree frogs use complex information processing when listening to the mating calls of male frogs to select their mates.  Kit Murphy (James Madison University) is discovering how females make their choices and may be close to answering the age old question, “Why is she with him?”  Also featured: Between 33 and 50 percent of [...]

Colonial Williamsburg, Monticello, and Mt. Vernon are popular destinations for American history tourism.  However, smaller sites are being developed with the help of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities that focus on the contributions of African Americans to early U.S. history.  Larissa Smith Fergeson (Longwood University) discusses the Thyne Institute in Mecklenburg County, Carver-Price High [...]