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In addition to being the state capital, Richmond, Virginia, was also the capital of the South during the Civil War. Today Richmond is a vibrant city that embraces its historical past while looking toward future developments. After Reconstruction, businesses developed, and the warehouse district - Shockoe Bottom - was rebuilt, boosting Richmond's economic growth. Then & Now: Richmond uses late-19th-century photographs of Richmond neighborhoods, churches, businesses, and schools, contrasting these historic photographs with contemporary views of the same Richmond sites such as St. John's Church, the Capitol, Broad Street, Main Street, and the Old Stone House. Then & Now: Richmond takes a step back in time and compares the glory of the past with the progress of the future.
Some cities, through hardship or glory or a combination of both, produce extraordinary women. Richmond in the early twentieth century, dominated by its prominent families and still haunted by the ghosts of its Confederate past, produced a galaxy of such characters, including Ellen Glasgow, Mary Cooke Branch Munford, and Lila Meade Valentine. Elisabeth Scott Bocock, Victorian in values but modern in outlook, carried on this tradition with her unique combination of family wealth and connections, boundless energy, eccentricity, and visionary zeal. Her daughter Mary Buford Hitz's candid memoir reveals the pleasures and frustrations of growing up with a woman who expected so much from her childre...
Robin Veder's The Living Line is a radical reconceptualization of the development of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American modernism. The author illuminates connections among the histories of modern art, body cultures, and physiological aesthetics in early-twentieth-century American culture, fundamentally altering our perceptions about art and the physical, and the degree of cross-pollination in the arts. The Living Line shows that American producers and consumers of modernist visual art repeatedly characterized their aesthetic experience in terms of kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement. They explored abstraction with kinesthetic sensibilities and used abstraction to ach...
As movies took the country by storm in the early twentieth century, Americans argued fiercely about whether municipal or state authorities should step in to control what people could watch when they went to movie theaters, which seemed to be springing up on every corner. Many who opposed the governmental regulation of film conceded that some entity—boards populated by trusted civic leaders, for example—needed to safeguard the public good. The National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (NB), a civic group founded in New York City in 1909, emerged as a national cultural chaperon well suited to protect this emerging form of expression from state incursions. Using the National Board's exten...
The history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Richmond, Virginia, invokes a rich but uncelebrated past. From the first recorded sodomy prosecution in America in 1624 to the fight to repeal the "crimes against nature" laws, LGBTs have left their imprint on almost 400 years of history in the Old Dominion's capital. Lesbian and Gay Richmond presents a photographic showcase of the events, people, and places that have been a part of this history. There are snapshots from the 1920s and 1930s when avant-garde and gay authors caroused and shared ideas in private homes. Previously untold stories from the post-World War II era tell of the rise of the gay cafAA(c)s in Richmond and the subsequent attempts by the authorities to shut their doors. Much like larger cities to the north and west of Richmond, the attempts to close these bars led to the first public protests in the late 1960s. Other images show how Richmond has a unique story to lend to the larger national LGBT history.
Using post-Civil War Richmond, Virginia, as a case study, Hoffman explores the role of race and class in the city building process from 1870 to 1920. Richmond's railroad connections enabled the city to participate in the commercial expansion that accompanied the rise of the New South. A highly compact city of mixed residential, industrial and commercial space at the end of the Civil War, Richmond remained a classic example of what historians call a "walking city" through the end of the century. As city streets were improved and public transportation became available, the city's white merchants and emerging white middle class sought homes removed from the congested downtown. The city's Africa...
In 1798 Robert Morris—“financier of the American Revolution,” confidant of George Washington, former U.S. senator—plunged from the peaks of wealth and prestige into debtors' prison and public contempt. How could one of the richest men in the United States, one of only two founders who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution, suffer such a downfall? This book examines for the first time the extravagant Philadelphia town house Robert Morris built and its role in bringing about his ruin. Part biography, part architectural history, the book recounts Morris’s wild successes as a merchant, his recklessness as a land speculator, and his unrestrained passion in building his palatial, doomed mansion, once hailed as the most expensive private building in the United States but later known as “Morris’s Folly.” Setting Morris’s tale in the context of the nation’s founding, this volume refocuses attention on an essential yet nearly forgotten American figure while also illuminating the origins of America’s ongoing, ambivalent attitudes toward the superwealthy and their sensational excesses.
Based on a historical analysis of the roots of Richmond's political evolution as well as on interviews and quantitative data, "Rights for a Season" places events in Richmond in a broader regional and national context of urban political development.
Explore the dark side of the history of the River City... Richmond has a curious share of horrific accidents, coolly calculated slaughter, and incidents of implacable deceit in its history. Here, the wronged, the devious, and the heartbroken enact their lives on the stage set of the River City's ostensibly genteel neighborhoods, where a tree-shaded city street may have been the site of a crime of passion and an innocuous path in the woods recalls a grisly unsolved murder. Discover these and other lesser-known stories, from a young bride poisoned by her husband to the horrific fate of an entire airliner. Local historian Selden Richardson explores tales from a time when murder and mayhem stalked the streets of Richmond.
The first thorough study of organized mainline churches in a major southern American city during the early 20th century