With Good Reason

When Jack Beck and Wendy Welch (University of Virginia at Wise) decided to move to the small mountain town of Big Stone Gap, they hadn’t planned on opening a used bookstore. But a big Victorian house captured their imaginations and before they knew it they were setting up shop. Despite the growing popularity of e-readers [...]

Ed Falco (Virginia Tech) is the author of the latest installment in the Godfather saga, a prequel to Mario Puzo’s original.  In The Family Corleone, Falco answers questions that have burned in fans’ minds for years – like Vito Corleone’s rise in the criminal underworld and how he became the Godfather.  It seems like an offer [...]

How many Victorian books would you have to read to know the Victorians? What if you could read all 1.7 million? Fred Gibbs (George Mason University) co-created a project that does just that. Using digital tools, he can search and then chart how frequently certain words—like “God,” “love,” and “science”—appear in all of 19th-century British [...]

The election of Abraham Lincoln as President touched off a secession crisis in the South.  In his book Showdown in Virginia, Bill Freehling (Virginia Foundation for the Humanities) focuses on turning points in Virginia’s months-long, bitter battle over whether to secede from the Union. Also: Historians estimate that of the nearly 5,000 pirates who terrorized America’s [...]

On college campuses, female students continue to outnumber male students. Films like Knocked Up and television shows like Last Man Standing suggest that being a man in America is ever more difficult. Real American men, so the narrative goes, are disappearing. David Magill (Longwood University) explores the myths and realities of the male crisis. Also [...]

One of the most important legal documents in history, the Magna Carta influenced the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. Nearly 800 years later, it’s now going online. Bruce O’Brien (University of Mary Washington) is leading an effort to translate and digitize 150 early English laws, including the Magna Carta. Also featured: The [...]

Aniko Bodroghkozy  (University of Virginia) is the author of the new book “Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement” which explores how the newly created evening news shows shaped attitudes about race relations during the Civil Rights Movement. She investigates the network news treatment of events including the 1965 Selma voting rights campaign, integration [...]

With the end of the War in Iraq, tens of thousands of soldiers have returned home, and many of them are going to college. But the transition to academia can be hard. Alexis Hart and Roger Thompson (Virginia Military Institute) are traveling the country, coaching professors on how to welcome and support veterans. Also featured: [...]

The Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage trail in northern Spain, continues to attract tens of thousands of travelers each year. Among those are George Greenia (William & Mary, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities), who for years has walked the 500-mile route with his students. George studies the relationship between medieval and modern pilgrimages. He [...]

In 1951 a group of African American students at Robert R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia, organized a strike to protest the substandard school facilities provided for black students. The walkout, led by 16 year old Barbara Johns, is one of the great stories in the struggle for Civil Rights—a story of courage [...]