The following is an adapted excerpt from The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War, used with the author’s permission. On August 30, 1800, a storm likely changed the course of the United States forever when an enslaved blacksmith named…
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On the morning of July 30, 1864, Union forces launched a bold yet catastrophically mishandled attempt to break the Confederate lines outside Petersburg, Virginia—an effort that would become known as the Battle of the Crater. As part of the larger Petersburg Campaign, the battle…
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In the summer of 1676, Virginia’s tidewater region simmered with discontent. Economic hardship, political grievances, and ongoing frontier conflicts converged to ignite one of the most significant uprisings in colonial American history: Bacon’s Rebellion. The colony of Virginia in the 17th century was a…
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