Mark Wahlgren Summers is Thomas D. Clark Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. He is author of many books, including The Press Gang: Newspapers and Politics, 1865-1878; The Presidency in Political Cartoons, 1776-1976; and A Dangerous Stir: Fear, Paranoia, and the Making of Reconstruction. We asked him a few questions ahead of his January 18 Foundry Series lecture. 

By Bryce VanStavern
White House Specialist

On December 26, 1811, Bank of Virginia President Abraham Venable died in a fire in the Richmond Theater. This event changed the life of another Richmond resident, a doctor named John Brockenbrough.

By John Coski
Historian

Perhaps the most underrated valuable materials in any library collection are pamphlets. The Museum’s large pamphlet collection includes hundreds of published tracts, addresses, reminiscences, unit histories, and organizational minutes.

One valley. Two towns, one Northern the other Southern. Their people had much in common: family ties, religious views, the soil they worked. Only one thing separated them: slavery.

Join us October 26 as we present a dramatization of Ed Ayers' new book, "The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America." Co-written by award-winning historians Abigail Schumann and Sheila Arnold Jones, this presentation highlights the voices of diverse people and their reactions to war, its aftermath, emancipation, and freedom.

By John Coski
Historian

By Adrian Brettle
Mellon Fellow

William J. Buchanan, a former United States envoy to Sweden and later a refugee in Confederate Richmond wrote that “The new map of America is as yet a blank… when the topographer shall take up his pencil to trace the outline of a renovated continent, he will mark, clear and strong, boundaries and State lines connected by new interests and determined by new power.”