Confederate statues have roiled Charlottesville since at least 2016, when Charlottesville High School student Zyahna Bryant petitioned City Council to remove them, a request that culminated in 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally. Charlottesville and its Lost Cause legacy have once again taken the national stage, this time as part of a major Los Angeles […]
The University of Virginia is often described as Jeffersonian, as academically elite, as a public Ivy. Less often used: cool. The Virginia Pep Band, during its nearly three-decade heyday, was cool. Pep Banned, a documentary that premieres at the Virginia Film Festival, captures the joyful subversion of the student-run band that took to the football […]
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—or, in this case, the trees. Henry Alexander Wiencek has followed in the footsteps of his parents, Charlottesville writers and historians Donna Lucey and Henry Wiencek, with his own book, Oil Cities: The Making of North Louisiana’s Boomtowns, 1901-1930, published by the University of Texas Press in May. […]
One of the biggest stories that shocked America 100 years ago—about a farm in Georgia where Black people were essentially enslaved and at least 11 men were murdered—is pretty much forgotten today. That will change with Earl Swift’s eighth book, Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second […]
Remember back in 2017, when some here learned their health insurance premiums could jump to $3,000 a month and that Charlottesville’s rates were the highest in the country? Those eye-popping premiums have drawn the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, which is taking a look at how the rates for Optima Health Plan, owned […]
The statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that has roiled Charlottesville since 2016—and led to 2017’s deadly influx of white supremacists—has ceased to exist, at least as a Lost Cause icon. When parts of the bronze monument hit the crucible in a 2,200-degree furnace recently, it was a solemn and emotional experience for the […]
Things have changed a lot since Ricardo Preve arrived at the bus station in Charlottesville in 1977 without money or a passport. There weren’t many Latinos in town then, and he found the locals welcoming, if ignorant about Latin America. “It was so easy to become a citizen in the ’80s,” recalls Preve. When he […]
Southern landscapes can evoke images of magnolias, Spanish moss, or Billie Holiday’s strange fruit. Those perceptions of the South as a beautiful but benighted part of the country bring three Black writers with deep Southern roots to the Virginia Festival of the Book March 19. “…[T]his landscape made me a writer,” says Ralph Eubanks in […]
If there was one guiding light throughout director Bo McGuire’s near-zero-budget filming of Socks on Fire, his tale of family division over his beloved Nanny’s house, it would be Dolly Parton know-how. From the country icon, McGuire learned to “work with what you have.” He was at NYU, and had the equipment to make a […]
Four years after white supremacists invaded Charlottesville for the Unite the Right rally, the biggest civil trial in federal court here starts October 25, and could last up to four weeks. The case is Sines v. Kessler. Nonprofit Integrity First for America filed the complaint in October 2017 on behalf of victims of that violent […]