Tag: history

A UVA bibliography

In the course of writing Ten Thousand Voices, I had the opportunity to read a lot of other histories of the University of Virginia. It occurred to me that others might appreciate the reading list of books I have consulted and found, so I pulled together this bibliography. In some cases I’ve quoted my reviews of the books from Goodreads.

Note: I’m going to keep this a live post as I identify additional books worth adding (or move things on my shelves and discover some more…).

Older

Adams, Hubert Baxter (1888). Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia. The earliest full history of the University, this handsome book (which you can read on Google Books) contains plates of photographs and architectural drawings of the University. It’s also the first to quote Emerson’s epigraph, “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” in the context of the University.

Bruce, Philip Alexander (1921). History of the University of Virginia, 1819 – 1919: The Lengthened Shadow of One Man. The granddaddy of all UVA histories, this five-volume book used student magazines and newspapers, official records (at least, those that survived the 1895 Rotunda fire), and a great many other sources to tell the story of Mr. Jefferson’s University. His coverage of the Glee Club was one of the reasons I started pulling together the history that ultimately became Ten Thousand Voices. Best way to read it is online, so you can search for the parts you want rather than having to read the entire thing.

Dabney, Virginius (1981). Mr. Jefferson’s University. A single (large) volume, it’s much more readable than Bruce’s work—and more contemporary as well. Dabney does a good job of covering the University’s transformation in the 20th century from a school for wealthy Southerners to a world class university, including its integration in the 1950s (of which Dabney was a strong proponent) and coeducation in the 1970s. Bonus: Dabney legendarily wrote about the best way to make a mint julep.

Patton, John S. (1906). Jefferson, Cabell and the University of Virginia. Another early 20th century attempt to tell the history, by the University’s librarian. There is accordingly additional detail about the history of the library as well as student groups and publications—and one of the earliest retellings of the 1895 Rotunda fire.

Clemons, Harry (1972). The University of Virginia Library, 1825-1950: Story of a Jeffersonian Foundation. Completing a tradition of two, following John Patton’s 1906 UVA history, Harry Clemons confines his writing to the history of the library. His engaging history tells the story from the beginning but also describes the creation of Alderman (now Shannon) Library.

Wood, Thomas Longstreet and John W. Fishburne (1890, rev. 1894). Arcade Echoes. A collection of student poetry from the University of Virginia, works spanning 1856 to 1890 and most originally published in the Virginia University Magazine (later University of Virginia Magazine, later Virginia Spectator). Relatively little UVA specific content, but if you want to feel the gulf of years between today and the students of more than 135 years ago, this is your best bet.

Rothery, Agnes (1944). A Fitting Habitation. Dodd, Mead & Co. A page-turner from 75 years ago. This is the history of author Agnes Rothery, her husband (and Virginia Glee Club conductor) Harry Rogers Pratt, and the houses of their married life, which included a former slave quarters behind Pavilion III that they christened The Mews. By turns funny, insightful, old fashioned, modern, and touching. Fun read.

McConnell, James Rogers (1917). Flying for France. A short, thrilling and sobering memoir from McConnell, who writes briskly and unsentimentally about his life as a volunteer aviator for France in the American Escadrille. He died in aerial combat a few months after the book was published, shortly before America officially entered the War. UVa friends will know McConnell (king of the Hot Feet, member of the Seven Society) from his statue on Grounds.

Vaughan, Joseph L. (1991). Rotunda Tales: Stories from the University of Virginia, 1920 – 1960. This book was on sale in the University bookstore when I was a first year student. Engaging (if occasionally quite dated) stories of life in the first half of the 20th century at UVa.

Clover, Cecile Wendover (1995). Holsinger’s Charlottesville. Spectacular collection of the work of early photographer Rufus W. Holsinger and his studio, which forms an invaluable record of life around the University and the town at the turn of the century and into the 1920s.

Contemporary and still available

Aprey, Maurice & Shelli M. Poe (eds) (2017). The Key to the Door. Thorough and engrossing history of the integration of the University of Virginia and first person histories of some of the trailblazing African American students. Should be required reading for those interested in Mr. Jefferson’s University and its imperfect embrace of the promise of his preamble to the Declaration of Independence.

Barefoot, Coy (2001). The Corner: A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia. An engaging, well-researched and photographed history of the other side of the street from the University, invaluable when you’re playing the game of “what was there before it was …?” that inevitably marks my visits to Mr. Jefferson’s stomping grounds.

Bowman, Rex and Carlos Santos (2013). Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University That Changed America. A great read about the riotous behavior of the early students at the University, and how the culture was ultimately changed.

Briggs, Frank (2021). The Old U(Va) and I: 1961 – 1965. A memoir fascinating, funny and infuriating by turns. I was a UVA grad but not part of the fraternity system, and Mr. Briggs’ stories about pledging Beta and some of the subsequent hijinks recounted remind me why I made that choice. Points given, though, for the honesty with which he recounts his attitudes as a student toward matters such as desegregation and the Civil Rights movement. It would have been very easy to tell a rosy story in hindsight rather than acknowledging the painful truths that these matters received no attention from most UVA students in the early 1960s, including himself. Ultimately the honesty and depth of story means that it’s a worthwhile read even though it left me not knowing whether to yell at Mr. Briggs or to shake his hand.

Gardner, Joel B (2018). From Rebel Yell to Revolution: 1966 – 1970. The back half of the 1960s are represented by Joel Gardner’s work, about which I wrote, “Full marks for the thoroughness and generally balanced nature of Mr. Gardner’s history of the transformation of the University from ‘Old U’ to its more modern incarnation. Points off for occasional unevenness of tone.”

Graham, Chris and Patrick Hite (2014). Mad About U: Four Decades of Basketball at University Hall. Good history of Virginia basketball during the University Hall days. Pluses: the coverage of the women’s basketball (hail Debbie Ryan! Hail the Burge twins!). Minuses: ends with Dave Leitao.

Hitchcock, Susan Tyler (1999). The University of Virginia: A Pictorial History. Hard to believe this one is twenty-five years old now. A turn of the century update on a popular staple, the coffee-table history.

Howard, Hugh (2003). Thomas Jefferson, Architect. A well-photographed book on the architectural side of Jefferson’s legacy. I wrote about it in 2020, “Not bad for a used bookstore find. There are better books on Monticello and the Academical Village, but the chapters on the Virginia Capitol and the private houses that Jefferson may or may not have designed were worth the price of admission. Nice photography too.”

Howard, Thomas L. and Owen W. Gallogly. Society Ties. This well-researched history of the Jefferson Society was (together with Michael Slon’s history of the Cornell Glee Club) what spurred my determination to write the history of the Virginia Glee Club. If a book could be published about the oldest student organization at the University, I reasoned, surely one could be published about the oldest student musical organization.

Spencer, Hawes (2018). Summer of Hate. A summary of the events of the “Unite the Right” march on Charlottesville and the University. Spencer’s shifts in time, topic, and perspective are disorienting and frustrating, but might just be a good way to process the chaos of the awful weekend of August 11 and 12, 2017. It could use an update for what happened to the rioters afterwards: the few convictions, and then the participation of some of them in the January 6, 2021 insurrection and attempt to steal the presidential election.

Willis, Garry (2006). Mr. Jefferson’s University. A slimmer re-telling of the origin of the University. Not as meaty as Dabney’s work but still a worthwhile read.

Wolfe, Brendan (2017). Mr. Jefferson’s Telescope. A slim coffee-table book showing 100 artifacts from the University’s history. Fascinating read.

A history of the Mews

I wrote a while ago about the Mews, the outbuilding to Pavilion III at the University of Virginia that was the home of Virginia Glee Club conductor Harry Rogers Pratt while he was at the University. I did not visit the Mews while I was at UVa this past weekend, but I remember thinking that I ought to do a little more research on the history of the building and its role as both faculty residence and (earlier) home for enslaved laborers.

Imagine my delight when I learned this morning that someone had already done much of this research. The Mews: Historic Structure Report was published by the office of the University of Virginia Architect sometime in 2021 and contains a pretty thorough history of the building. It also put me on the trail of a book that Pratt’s wife, travel writer Agnes Rothery, wrote about their quarter of a century occupying the building and the changes they made to it. I’ve found a copy on eBay and will report back.

Testament of Thompson

Randall Thompson at the piano at the University of Virginia with Glee Club members (including Paul Webb Bourjaily) and Glee Club director Stephen Tuttle

I enjoyed reading this essay on Randall Thompson and The Testament of Freedom by Honey Meconi, who is both the inaugural Arthur Satz Professor at the University of Rochester and Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music (as well as a former member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus).

In addition to summarizing the received critical wisdom about the work (“popular rather than original”), Meconi’s essay calls out a point that I missed: that the longevity of the work may in part be due to Thompson’s completing its symphonic orchestration in time for the Boston Symphony to use it in their memorial concert for Franklin D. Roosevelt at Carnegie Hall. She also notes the irony of the original TTBB setting, due to the fact that UVa’s undergraduate program was not coeducational at the time (though, as we know, the woman’s Madrigal Singers group, made of students from the University’s other schools, would perform with the Virginia Glee Club several times during the war years).

Anyway, the essay is worth a read, as are the other essays on her site, which she collectively calls “The Choral Singer’s Companion.”

Renaming Alderman

Cavalier Daily: Board of Visitors to vote on renaming Alderman Library, undergraduate tuition increases. Renaming the soon-to-be-rebuilt Alderman Library after Edgar Shannon has a number of benefits, starting with signaling that Alderman’s white supremacist and eugenicist views no longer are acceptable at the University. That Shannon oversaw a substantial expansion of the racial integration underway when he became the University’s fourth president AND ushered in undergraduate coeducation is kind of the icing on the cake.

For context: Alderman is widely known to have held white supremacist views. He has been quoted as saying, “It is settled, I believe, that this white man who has shown himself so full of courage and force, shall rule in the South, because he is fittest to rule.” He appointed white supremacist professors and spoke at the unveiling of the infamous statue of Robert E. Lee.

The article linked above names a few eugenicists associated with the University of Virginia in the early 20th century. Another was John Powell, composer, pianist, and eugenicist, who co-founded the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. That organization sponsored the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which was eventually overturned in the decision of Loving vs. Virginia. Powell was named an honorary member of the Virginia Glee Club in 1935.

Sixteen years after Powell was named an honorary member, Edwin S. Williams became the Virginia Glee Club’s first African-American member. Four years later, he was refused service at a truck stop on the way back from a performance with Club at the National Gallery of Art. Glee Club conductor Donald Loach complained to Edgar Shannon, who had Paul Saunier investigate. Saunier, who had been instrumental in convincing businesses on the Corner to de-segregate or risk losing UVA custom, was able to accomplish the same feat with the truck stops along Route 29.

Acknowledging the painful parts of our history—as a University, as America—means that we also get to acknowledge the parts we get right. Nothing is perfect, but when we take action to correct past injustices, we help to bend the arc of the universe just a small bit.

The Civil War record of Seth Freeman

I’ve told the story of my great-great grandfather Obadiah Jarrett during the Civil War, and how he narrowly escaped being shot as a deserter from the Confederate army. On a recent visit to the Freeman Gap Baptist Church Cemetery in Madison County, North Carolina, I was reminded that my grandmother’s side of the family also saw service during the conflict, and with a clear day yielding a good shot of Seth’s tombstone (above), I thought it would be a good time to learn a little about what he had done during the war.

The tombstone provides us with the obvious first clue: Seth served in Company C of the 2nd North Carolina Mounted Infantry—a Union regiment. The Second was formed in Knoxville in the fall of 1863, and Seth was one of several Freeman boys from Buncombe County (none his direct kin, though presumably some were cousins) who enlisted; he joined up on September 26, 1863, at age 18.

According to National Park Service records, the new regiment was ordered to Greeneville about three weeks after Seth enlisted, then headed to Bull’s Gap before marching across the Clinch Mountains to the Clinch River, where Seth and the regiment saw action at Walker’s Ford on December 2. The regiment then was moved down to Mississippi through February before returning to Cumberland Gap. The regiment moved into Western North Carolina in late March and early April, 1865, and served until August 16, 1865 when the unit was mustered out.

As part of these events, the Second advanced on Asheville, but was unable to take it from the 62nd North Carolina Infantry. They later were directed to Swannanoa Gap, where on May 6, 1865 they encountered a Confederate force led by General Thomas. In the ensuing skirmish, Union soldier James Arwood was killed. This event was recorded as the last battle and last casualty of the Civil War, coming weeks after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

The one event in Seth’s service that has a definitive record of his participation happened in 1864, when Major-General Schofield ordered a detachment of the 2nd to join the 3rd on a mission to make a raid against the enemy and destroy bridges. Due to a classic military clerical error, the men of the detachment were erroneously listed as deserters in the rolls of their regiments. It took until 1869 and an act of Congress to correct the error in their record. I’m going to need to dig a little more into what happened here; an entire detachment being “accidentally” marked as deserters is interesting. (See below for update.)

Seth returned home, married Cyntha (or Syntha or Cynthia) Dent Lunsford in 1866, and died in 1914. It’s said that his faithful dog was so heartbroken when Seth was buried that he dug down into his grave three feet to try to get to the casket.

Update 4/22: The Third North Carolina Mounted Infantry Regiment is an interesting unit. Known as “Kirk’s Raiders” and “bushwackers,” the unit became known for its guerilla tactics. Seth’s records show that he was detached to the Third in June of 1864 and did not rejoin the Second until April 1865. During that time, the unit fought at Bulls Gap and Red Banks in Tennessee, and led Stoneman’s Last Raid.

Change

I was at the Virginia Glee Club annual dinner last night, and as always it was the perfect combination of reconnection and reminders of the passing of time. The more often I come to these things, the more the members of the Club and their guests look like my friends, and also like they could be my children. (One young woman at our table, whom I had first met at last year’s dinner, let me know that her mother was UVA class of 1989, or just a few years older than me; then there was the mother of another member who was herself class of 1993.)

The University itself is in constant change; as my cab driver remarked on the way into town from the airport, “It wouldn’t be Charlottesville without something under construction.” This time of course it was Alderman Library, which is famously losing its incredibly dense and labyrinthine stacks and gaining … something. But also it was the building to the right of New Cabell Hall that was under reconstruction, and the myriad of businesses that didn’t survive the pandemic. And even the inn I stayed at, which when I was in school was student apartments; a friend lived there for a few years.

So it was in a pensive mood as I walked back to my hotel from breakfast, and decided to take a different route around Grounds. And found myself walking through Dawson’s Row. I’ve only written a little bit about the Row — all that remains of a set of buildings of varying purposes and origins that originally stretched in an arc from Monroe Hill to where the front steps of New Cabell Hall now stand. Some were originally constructed as dormitories; these were demolished over the years, and no trace of them remains.

One housed Arthur Fickénscher, the first professor of music at the University and conductor of the Virginia Glee Club from 1932 to 1933.

One was built as the parsonage for the University, becoming the first building constructed for religious purposes on Grounds. Built in 1850, it appears to have been expanded in the later 19th century, gaining Italianate porches and roof brackets and possibly losing a rear porch (seen as the black line across the brickwork in the second photo).

And one, inevitably, was slave quarters for James Monroe’s house across the way at Monroe Hill, or so oral tradition says:

The latter buildings, along with a late 19th century cottage, comprise the Office of African American Affairs at the University. I never saw the buildings as an undergraduate; I knew they were there but had no reason to engage with them. It was only recently, as I was writing Ten Thousand Voices and reading works about the University to inform my research, that I thought about why the OAAA was so important. It came as I was reading The Key to the Door, which I highly recommend for those looking to understand how UVA integrated in the 1950s and 1960s—and, to be honest, through the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s.

And through that research, the way I view the University has changed. I still feel it is my home; in some ways, I belong to it more than ever. But I now can see where the footprints of enslaved laborers were. And yes, some aspects of the University have changed. But that’s not where the most important changes have been. As I learn, as I dig, as I acknowledge that I am old enough to be these young adults’ parents, I feel even more keenly the responsibility of the past, the need to own this story and tell it and compel action from it.

Deserter pardoned: the Obediah story

Obediah Jarrett’s tombstone, Antioch Ponder cemetery

A few years ago I shared a pointer to my sister Esta’s oral history record with my uncle Forrest, including his telling of how my great-great-grandfather, whose name is varyingly spelled Obadiah or Obediah, was personally saved from being executed as a deserter by North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance. It’s a great story, one that he told over and over and over.* But there’s always been a small question in the back of my mind: where was the evidence? What was the rest of the story?

Well, last night sitting with Esta and my parents after the funeral, I went looking for the evidence. And I found it, in a 2012 book by Aldo S. Perry, Civil War Courts-Martial of North Carolina Troops. And, astonishingly, the family story is true! Mostly. And the parts I didn’t know are stranger than fiction.

So, then. Obediah Jarrett, together with his brother Jacob P. Jarrett, enlisted in the North Carolina Fifth Cavalry on May 14, 1862 in Marshall, North Carolina. The unit was, essentially, a “mountain boy” division, made up of folks from western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, and they saw a fair bit of action over the next year all over the southeast, including battles at Brandy Station, Virginia on June 9, 1863, described as the largest cavalry battle ever fought in North America and as a pivotal turning point in the Civil War, and at Chickamauga, Georgia on September 20, later that year. Chickamauga in particular appears to have been a bloodbath; 20% of the Confederate forces were killed.

Just exactly when Obediah attempted to desert is not clear. One source I consulted says that he deserted on August 7, 1863, between his unit’s two battles, but I think that’s unlikely unless the policy toward deserters changed. Because at his desertion recorded on August 1, 1864 in Concord, Tennessee, he was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to be executed.

Side note: Perry’s history of Obediah’s division records that the Fifth Cavalry merged with the Seventh Cavalry to form the Sixth Cavalry within the 65th Regiment, and that this merger may have been the reason for the desertion of Obediah and others. In fact, the unit led the Confederacy with 31 absences per company, 10 courts martial, and 7 death sentences. Perry notes that the North Carolina soldiers volunteered into North Carolina units of company size, but found themselves realigned into a huge regiment that included companies of Virginians and was led by a Virginian. In 1864, the captain of Obediah’s company, Company I, resigned his commission because “my command has deserted to the enemy and to the mountains of western NC and after attempting I find it impossible to get them together.”

At any rate, Obediah deserted on August 1, 1864, together with a fellow Madison County soldier, Jobe R. Redmon. They were court-martialed on separate days and both sentenced to death. Redmon wrote a letter home on November 2, 1864 from his imprisonment in Kinston, North Carolina, telling his family:

“My dear wife and children I seate myself this morning with a troubbeled harte and a destrest mind to try to rite a few line to let you no that I hird my sentens red yesterday and hit was very bad I am very sory to let you no for [one line not legible] all ready I hafte to bee shot the 9 of this month I am sory to in form you that I have but 7 days to live But I hope and trust in God when they have slane my body that God will take my sould to rest.”

Redmon’s descendants kept this letter and read it every year on the anniversary of his execution.

So what happened to Obediah? Well, it’s remarkably like what my Uncle said. A man named H. H. Baird prepared a request for pardon for both men to Jefferson Davis, and separately sent a letter to his cousin, governor Zeb Vance, appealing the decision, and specifically citing the change in terms of his commission as a reason for clemency. In a postscript, he emphasized, “The day has not as yet been appointed for the execution of Private Obediah Jarrett.” Whatever happened, Obediah’s death sentence was remitted by SO #260, issued on November 1, 1864—strikingly a day before Redmon’s letter home. Redmon’s sentence was not commuted and he died.

Why Obediah was spared and Redmon executed is unknown, as is why Redmon had a date for execution before Obediah despite having been court-martialed six days later. The record is silent, but suggests that there was some sort of favoritism shown to my great-great-grandfather—and thank goodness.

At any rate, Obediah, his death sentence commuted, remained in prison until Union forces defeated the remainder of the 65th at the Battle of Wyse Fork, fought March 7-10, 1865, near Kinston. He was taken prisoner of war by the Union troops but released after taking an oath of allegiance to the United States, and from thence headed home.

The last part of the story as my Uncle tells it, is that my great-grandfather Zebulon B. Jarrett was named for the North Carolina governor who saved his father’s life. That part is almost certainly true. However, genealogical records give us one last wrinkle: Zeb Jarrett was born three years and 11 months before his father was freed, and a year before he enlisted. Zeb was almost certainly named after Zebulon Vance, but he had a different name at birth, which has sadly been lost due to the destruction of our family Bible when my Aunt Jewell’s dorm burned in a fire.

This is why I study history: truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s sometimes downright weirder.

* The last “over” there goes to the Applachian Barns Project’s documentation of the 19th century barn on my grandmother’s farm, documented from my uncle’s stories.

New year, new writing

I haven’t written much on the blog in a while. But that’s not because I haven’t been writing.

On Wednesday, December 30, I finished my first draft of a book I’ve been working on, off and on, for years: the history of the first 150 years of the Virginia Glee Club. Sort of finished, anyway: I closed the document, took our dog for a walk, and realized when I walked back in the door that I had forgotten things.

I expect to continue to have that realization for a while. There is, of course, a lot of ground to cover, and I’ve inevitably left things out—like the biographies of many individual Glee Club members I’ve researched over the years. Or important historical events that add context to the work. Or…

Well, you get the drift. The reality is that the work that I’ve done on the history of the group is spread across a bunch of places: Glee Club newsletters, the history wiki, even a Pinterest board I started over the summer. The book will hopefully, for the interested reader, be the tip of the iceberg.

And now I can, maybe, start writing in other places. Like here. Someday.

Just as soon as I get the thing published. And that’ll be a whole different journey that I will share as I am able.

King’s Weigh House

During our vacation week in London, we walked by the church above probably half a dozen times. I was struck by the structure—the polychrome, the oval chapel—and by the odd coincidence of the church’s presence on Binney Street, which was the address of our first apartment when we moved to Cambridge, Mass.

I finally got around to looking up the church, intrigued by its odd name. The King’s Weigh House church was indeed built over the site of the King’s weigh house, but that was in Little Eastcheap rather than its current Mayfair site. (The original site first held St. Andrew Hubbard church, which was destroyed by the Great Fire of London, then replaced by a weigh house that became a chapel for dissenters in 1695 before moving up the street.)

The congregation was forced to move when the Metropolitan Railway purchased the land on Eastcheap, but the Duke of Westminster donated the current site. The new building was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, the architect responsible for the London Natural History Museum, a handful of buildings at Oxford, and, amusingly, Strangeways Prison.

Oh, and Binney Street? Turns out it’s named for English Congregationalist preacher Thomas Binney, explaining its reuse for a street in Congregationalist Cambridge. (Oh, and our apartment in the complex formerly called Worthington Place turns out to have been in a National Historic District!)

Shaker Glen

Yesterday morning, I happened to take a different route to work and noticed a sign along the road (courtesy, it turns out, of Lexington’s Eagle Scouts) for Shaker Glen. This wasn’t just a fanciful developer’s name for the subdivision that’s there; it turns out there was, briefly, a significant Shaker presence in the Lexington area.

First, the subdivision. Peacock Farm was a postwar modernist subdivision, designed by Walter Pierce, that’s literally right down the road from my house. It turns out that the developers of Peacock Farm, Edward Green and Harmon White, replicated the Peacock Farm design in a couple other areas around Lexington, including at Shaker Glen. But why did it get that name?

Seems the area came by the name honestly. From the Lexington historic survey site:

The name Shaker Glen refers to part of the hemlock-lined glen which extends into neighboring Woburn. In the late 1700s Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, settled temporarily at the Kendall Farm in Woburn, which included part of the glen. Nathan and Sarah Kendall were converted to the Shaker faith in 1781. But local residents were suspicious of the Shakers and the Kendalls sold the farm and left Woburn while Mother Ann Lee went on to establish a utopian religious community in Harvard, Massachusetts in 1791.

So not only is Shaker Glen named for a real Shaker settlement, it’s named because the founder of the Shaker faith lived there. Who says history is boring?

Reckoning with Jim Crow

Cavalier Daily: Sullivan announces commission focused on UVa’s history with racial segregation. Clearly President Sullivan isn’t completely playing the lame duck. I am grateful that the University of Virginia continues its commitment to exploring its original sins, and recognizes that those don’t stop with slavery. Other notes in UVA Today.

While the reckoning is long overdue at UVa, it’s worth noting that it isn’t the only university coming to grips with its history in this regard, and may even be ahead of some of its northern colleagues. As an MIT alum, I got an email from the president of the institute yesterday discussing MIT founder (and former UVA professor) George Barton Rogers’s slave-owning history, which is discussed in a Boston Globe article today. The fact that L. Rafael Reif could say “Quite frankly, it was shocking to me” and that he is still “reeling” simply means he, and the Institute, haven’t been paying attention.

Making history. Or at least transcribing it

Boston Globe: Boston Public Library asks for help in transcribing abolitionist letters. William Lloyd Garrison’s letters are among the more frequently consulted collections in the Boston Public Library; this project seeks to make them accessible and searchable over the web. This is a rare opportunity, in this world of Google Books and OCR, to help to digitize an asset the old fashioned way. You can sign up to help at antislaverymanuscripts.org. The effort uses the new-to-me Zooniverse platform, which enforces not just crowd sourcing but also crowd-correction: no transcription is accepted unless three volunteers provide the same transcription.

I did a bit of book transcription when I had my first Internet-facing job in 1994, as an undergraduate in the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia (now absorbed into the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities), but most of what I worked on was marking up and correcting texts transcribed by volunteers at Project Gutenberg. Crowdsourcing digitization goes way back.

The Virginia Glee Club in World War II, part 2

This is a continuation of a post from earlier this week.

I’ve finished an index of Virginia Glee Club members who gave their lives in World War II. Here are a few more stories:

Mason Williams was shot down over Munich at the end of 1944.

John McCown died fighting in the mountains near Florence and is buried there.

John Gordon died serving in the cavalry in Europe.

Moss Plunkett was killed in action in New Guinea in 1943.

Louis Smith died two months before V-J Day, somewhere in the Pacific Theatre.

Alfred Marshall Luttrell, like Robert Gamble and Edmund Van Valkenburg, was killed in action, though we know nothing further about his death. 

In addition to the casualties, a further ninety-eight Glee Club alumni are known to have served in the war.

 

The Virginia Glee Club in World War II, part 1

Rotunda memorial tablet for UVA students killed in World War II. Photo courtesy Andrew Breen

As part of my ongoing work on the history of the Virginia Glee Club, I started researching the lives of Club members who became casualties of World War II. With some help from fellow fossil Andrew Breen, who thoughtfully photographed the Rotunda memorial tablet for me, I’ve been able to fill in a few additional names of Glee Club alums who gave their lives in service. This work is ongoing; I have no doubt I’ll find more than the seven I’ve found thus far.

It’s fascinating to me to learn about the particulars of the heroism of these young men. Of the seven I know about so far, five died in action overseas, but two died in accidents in training or at Stateside bases. One, Edwin Robson Nelson, died a prisoner aboard a Japanese ship in the Philippines. Another, Bruce H. Bode, suffered engine failure in his small plane while taking off in France, and changed course to avoid crashing into a backyard occupied by children playing, knowing that he would destabilize his aircraft and almost certainly die as a result. William Noland Berkeley Jr. landed in France six weeks after D-Day and was killed in action in an ambush a month later. Robert Gamble and Edmund Van Valkenburg were killed in action, though we know nothing further about their deaths. Ralph Chandler‘s plane disappeared while on a flight to the USMC base at El Toro, California, and Fielding Mercer died while Stateside in Pensacola, Florida.

The variety of ways in which young men gave their lives to save their country during this war is both inspiring and daunting. I’ll post more information as I get it.

Removing the Confederate plaques on the Rotunda

Rotunda memorial plaques, courtesy Richard Dizon, Cavalier Daily

On Friday, the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia voted to remove a pair of bronze memorial plaques listing the UVA students who were killed fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Early Saturday morning, workers removed the plaques. Per the BOV resolution, the plaques will be “moved to a location at the University where they can be viewed as artifacts.”

The tablets in question were installed on the Rotunda in the early 1900s—the CD says “1903” but Philip Alexander Bruce says they were installed and dedicated by UVa’s first president, Edwin Alderman, in 1906, as a gift of the Confederate Memorial Association and the Albemarle Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. (Note that the Glee Club raised funds for the Confederate Memorial Association in 1890.)

The actions over the weekend are a direct outcome from the events that happened in Charlottesville over August 11–13, in which torch bearing neo-Nazis marched through Grounds shouting anti-Semitic slogans. Passing up into Grounds from the Bookstore and presumably passing the student center at Newcomb Hall on their way up the Lawn, they came around the Rotunda, which bore these plaques on its south side, and surrounded a group of 25 counter-protesting students at Moses Ezekiel’s statue of Thomas Jefferson. They jeered and chanted at the students, and then they threw kerosene and lit torches at them.

Tyler Magill, who was in the Glee Club with me in the early 1990s and who I count as a friend, had joined the students by this time. He was struck by a torch on the side of his neck, which eventually led, a few days later, to his suffering a stroke.

More horrors happened over the weekend, including 20 year old James Alex Fields driving his car through a crowd of protesters, deliberately murdering Heather Heyer and injuring many others.

I have been trying to write my feelings about what happened that horrific weekend for over a month, and have not been able to. Among other reasons, it feels as though once I started I wouldn’t be able to stop.

But part of it is that today’s liberal Charlottesville sits atop a veritable Indian burial ground of undercurrents of racism and secession. This is, after all, the school where the Jefferson Society debated, on January 14th, 1860, whether a state had the right to secede from the Union (the conclusion was affirmative), and where the Washington Society decided in a November 1860 debate that the Southern States should secede; where students flew the flag of the Confederacy atop the Rotunda in February 1861. And it was also the school that was built with slave labor and that ran on the efforts of enslaved workers, and that was founded by a United States President who wrote “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” but who held both a peculiar definition of “all” and over 100 slaves.

So it is that Charlottesville seems a seat of that original sin of our country, and that our past is now coming home to roost.

The University’s actions to remove the names of those who fought to uphold slavery from its most central, symbolic building are a good start. I think the decision to display the memorials elsewhere is a good way to resolve the tension I have felt about removing public Confederate symbols. I don’t want us to forget our historic complicity in injustice and violence, but I also don’t want those reminders to continue their mission of oppression.