On July 27, 2023, Dr. James Broomall gave a fascinating presentation on artifacts taken from the battlefields of the Civil War that helped shape the memory of the conflict. From Col. Elmer Ellsworth’s death coat to the shattered tree stump of Spotsylvania, Civil War Americans actively collected and displayed objects of war. These battle pieces appeared in small museums at the turn of the twentieth century to help visitors understand the blasted landscapes from which they came. This talk will explore the lives of artifacts after they were taken from the field of action in order to understand how they informed the construction of memory. Objects with violent histories both contested and confirmed the prevailing discourse of romanticism in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, Americans clung to things connected to death and violence. On the other, Americans projected violence as regenerative to justify bloodshed. Dr. James J. Broomall is an associate professor of history at Shepherd University and the director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War, which promotes a dialogue among popular and academic audiences by integrating scholarship, education, and engagement. He is a cultural historian of the Civil War era and has published many articles and essays in journals and magazines, including Common Place: The Journal of Early American Life, Civil War History, and The Journal of the Civil War Era. James is the author of Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers (2019). He is currently working on a book project titled, “Battle Pieces: The Art and Artifacts of the American Civil War Era,” which explores how historical imagery and military artifacts were used to create representations of violence, war, and death. This lecture is presented in partnership with the Wilton House Museum.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

At the Cannon’s Mouth: Battlefield Relics and the Making of Civil War Memory

On February 8, 2024, historian Marvin T. Chiles discussed the subject of his new book The Struggle to Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond.

Much is known about the City of Richmond’s troubled past with race and race relations. Richmond was one of the largest entrepot for the transatlantic slave trade, the capital of the Confederacy, a foundational city for Jim Crow segregation, the sacred home of Confederate memorialization, and the hotbed of Massive Resistance to school desegregation. Less talked about, however, is that Richmond was a national leader in racial reconciliation efforts after the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Residents, business leaders, and public history organizations spent the last three decades of the twentieth century seeking to fix Richmond’s economy and public history scene to overcome its reputation and reality of racial strife, a conundrum created by the city’s troubled history. Yet, Richmond’s reconciliation movement unintendedly exacerbated the vestiges of past discrimination, that being racial gaps in wealth building, housing stability, and educational achievement. This lecture, based on The Struggle for Change, implores Richmonders and those interested in urban affairs, race relations, and southern history to not see current racial disparities as a continuum of past discrimination. Rather, Richmond’s recent history shows that progressive actions and actors exacerbated systemic issues through making positive changes in their city, the South, and nation. 

Dr. Marvin T. Chiles is the Assistant Professor of African American History at Old Dominion University. The Struggle for Change is his first book. He has also published several articles, including “A Period of Misunderstanding: Reforming Jim Crow in Richmond, Virginia, 1930–1954,” which won the William M. E. Rachal Award from the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in 2021.

Racial Reconciliation In Modern Richmond

On February 22, 2024, historians Cassandra Good and Carolyn Eastman presented a lecture on the Washington family, celebrity, and the development of the new United States.

While it’s widely known that George and Martha Washington never had children of their own, few are aware that they raised children together. In Good's book First Family, we see Washington as a father figure and are introduced to the children he helped raise, tracing their complicated roles in American history. The children of Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage—Eliza, Patty, Nelly and Wash Custis—were born into life in the public eye, well-known as George Washington’s family and keepers of his legacy. By turns petty and powerful, glamorous and cruel, the Custises used Washington as a means to enhance their own power and status. As enslavers committed to the American empire, the Custis family embodied the failures of the American experiment that finally exploded into civil war—all the while being celebrities in a soap opera of their own making.

Cassandra Good is a writer and historian focused on gender and politics in early America who currently serves as Associate Professor of History at Marymount University. She is the author of the prize-winning Founding Friendships: Friendships between Men and Women in the Early American Republic and her newest book, First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America. Carolyn Eastman is an historian of early America with special interest in eighteenth and nineteenth-century histories of political culture, the media, and gender. She is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University and the author most recently of the award-winning The Strange Genius of Mr. O: The United States’ First Forgotten Celebrity.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

First Family: George Washington's Heirs and the Making of America

On March 7, 2024, biographer Rebecca Boggs Roberts provided an unflinching look at First Lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson.

While this nation has yet to elect its first female president—and though history has downplayed her role—just over a century ago a woman became the nation’s first acting president. In fact, she was born in 1872, and her name was Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. She climbed her way out of Appalachian poverty and into the highest echelons of American power and in 1919 effectively acted as the first female president of the United States when her husband, Woodrow Wilson, was incapacitated. Beautiful, brilliant, charismatic, catty, and calculating, she was a complicated figure whose personal quest for influence reshaped the position of First Lady into one of political prominence forever. Rebecca Boggs Roberts offered an unflinching look at the woman whose ascent mirrors that of many powerful American women before and since, one full of the compromises and complicities women have undertaken throughout time in order to find security for themselves and make their mark on history.

Rebecca Boggs Roberts is an award-winning educator, author, and speaker, and a leading historian of American women’s suffrage and civic participation. She is currently deputy director of events at the Library of Congress and serves on the board of the National Archives Foundation, on the Council of Advisors of the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation, and on the Editorial Advisory Committee of the White House Historical Association. Her books include the award-winning The Suffragist Playbook: Your Guide to Changing the World; Suffragists in Washington, D.C.: The 1913 Parade and the Fight for the Vote; and Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson

Step into the vaults of history with "Treasures of Virginia," a podcast series that delves deep into the stories behind the remarkable objects on display at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture's (VMHC). Each episode is a journey through time, guided by the artifacts that have shaped Virginia's rich and diverse history. Interviews with expert historians and curators offer listeners a comprehensive understanding of Virginia's past and its enduring impact on the present.

Join us on a voyage of discovery as we unlock the secrets of Virginia's past, one artifact at a time. "Treasures of Virginia" invites you to explore history in a whole new light and gain a profound appreciation for the enduring legacy of the Commonwealth.

The Lead Plate that Started a World War

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work.

Transcript
Narrator: Sonia Delaunay’s "Toy Box," from 1913, is a sculpture made of wood and painted with acrylic. Its body is a rectangular box around 8 inches tall, 14 inches wide, and 9 inches deep. It has an upper lid that is hinged on one of its long sides. The lid gently rises in the middle to form a barrel-shape with an arching crest along the two shorter sides. 

Brightly painted playful geometric shapes cover the entire surface. They include rectangles, triangles, quadrilaterals and other multisided polygons, as well as stripes of varying thicknesses. The shapes are oriented in different directions and some of their edges seem to overlap as if layered. Each shape is a single color, saturated yet muted. The box primarily features tomato red, cantaloupe orange, mustard yellow, navy, and mint green, and there are touches of blush, butter yellow, slate blue, toffee, mahogany, black, and creamy white.  

The paint has been applied to the surface in layers. Throughout the box, the top layer has chipped away to reveal speckles of an underlayer in cantaloupe orange. At some places along the sculpture’s edges, the paint has completely worn away to reveal its wooden form and the tiny nails that hold it together. In some areas, the blocks of color are vaguely transparent, gently veiling the orange color beneath. Wide brush strokes are often visible, indicating the daubs and directions of the artist’s hand. 

On close inspection, a few unique shapes on the box stand out because they suggest stylized representative forms, rather than abstract elements. On the top of the lid, a dark circle outlined thinly in red sits near one corner. The circle’s center is divided into three segments: One quarter is white, another quarter is black, and the remaining half is brown. There are other brown, white, and black circles on the lid: one bordered with a crescent shape at its edge; one with stripes beaming from it like rays, and one uniformly dotted in white. These represent cosmic forms such as moons, suns, and stars. These dark tones seem to recede within the brighter, colorful surroundings.  

Also on the top of the lid, a brown square sits tilted at an angle with a red triangle projecting from one side. This form is a simple building with a gabled roof. Nearby, a subtle brown arrow extends from one of the lid’s edges, indicating how the box opens. On the box’s sides, other shapes are possibly representational, such as a simplified windmill, a tree, and streetlights.  

Just beneath the lid, a thin horizontal stripe of blue runs along the box’s four sides, and a similar stripe runs along the base in tomato red and black. The lid’s four sides are painted with side-by-side blocks of color in cantaloupe orange, tomato red, creamy white, navy, and black. The blocks vary in width and height, getting taller where the lid arches upward on its two shorter edges. 

Adapted from Caitlin Glosser’s essay “Sonia Delaunay: Simultaneity Freed from Painting”, Delaunay produced work in diverse materials, including this wooden toy box, regardless of their perceived value. She explained, “[T]he true beauty of an object is not an effect of taste but is intimately tied to its function.”

Orphism - Verbal Descriptions

Exhibition Website

Description of Toy Box (Coffret à jouets), 1913

Access a slow-looking exercise of this work.

Transcript
Narrator: "Windows Open Simultaneously 1st Part, 3rd Motif" is an oil-on-canvas painting from 1912 by Robert Delaunay. It is an elongated oval ellipse almost 2 feet at its tallest and 4 feet at its widest. This painting is one in a series of works in which the artist explores representations of reality and abstraction through open-window motifs. 

This dynamic composition is filled with geometric shapes—primarily triangles, rectangles, trapezoids, and other irregular, straight-sided forms that contrast with the canvas’s gentle curves. In a few instances, its curves are echoed by half-moons or pie slices. Most shapes are colored in oranges, butter yellows, creamy whites, deep greens, blues, or purples, with a small percentage in red or black. The colors are not solid but instead vary in shades, transitioning from dark to light tones. Some shapes’ edges dissipate into a cloud of white. These rhythmic patterns of form and color suggest that shapes are layered over and under each other. 

The arrangement of shapes lends a feeling of overall vertical movement to the composition. In some areas, the straight sides of stacked shapes are aligned, giving the impression that continuous vertical lines run through the work. Similarly, there is a subtle sense of diagonal movement crossing from left and right sides. Slanted continuous lines between shapes intersect each other like latticework or crosshatching. 

The work’s vertical and diagonal movement is further emphasized by its color arrangement. Similarly colored shapes are roughly stacked in vertical columns, and where diagonal lines appear, they seem to slice segments of a color in two, with a hard edge separating a slight variation in shade on each side. In 1913 Delaunay wrote, “Line is limitation. Color gives depth not perspectival, not successive, but simultaneous depth as well as form and movement.” 

This prismatic effect from the work’s shapes, colors, patterns, and sense of movement reminds one of glass, at once transparent and reflective, insubstantial and solid. The title references windows, and a green attenuated shape at its center represents a view of a very reductive Eiffel Tower —subjects Delaunay explored in many works. Also appearing on the right, diagonal arrangements of shapes with soft curves at their bottom edges evoke yellow, green, and purple swaths. These may suggest a curtain around the window.

Description of Windows Open Simultaneously 1st Part, 3rd Motif, 1912

PEM Walks - Yin Yu Tang

What is in PEM Curator, Karina Corrigan's personal wünderkammer? What is in yours? Dive deep into PEM's recreation of a 17th century cabinet of wonders, or wünderkammer — filled with carefully arranged porcelain and lacquer, seashells, stuffed specimens of animals and rare antiquities hand-picked from PEM’s collection. It's all part of the exhibition Saints, Sinners, Lovers and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks at PEM through May 4, 2025. 

PEMcast 038 - Oh, wünderkammer, my wünderkammer

In this episode of the PEMcast we explore one of the nation’s earliest and most historically significant museum collections of Korean art and culture. Join us inside PEM's new gallery and look closely at the objects on view. Learn about a fascinating 19th century friendship that helped form PEM’s significant Korean collection and the ongoing good will that continues today. Interviews include Jiyeon Kim, PEM’s Curator of Korean Art, our Chief Philanthropy Officer Sue Kim, and Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM’s Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Executive Director and CEO.

PEMcast 039 - Behind the scenes of PEM’s new Yu Kil-Chun Gallery of Korean Art and Culture

Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, 2008

You are viewing an archived account and this page is no longer updated. For podcasts and lecture audio, please find us on RedCircle and at VirginiaHistory.org/Podcasts. 

This series contains audio from lectures given in person or online at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture by renowned authors on historical topics. The content and opinions expressed by guest lecturers in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.To view a video of the lecture, visit VirginiaHistory.org/video. 

The Virginia Museum of History & Culture is owned and operated by the Virginia Historical Society — a private, non-profit organization. The historical society is the oldest cultural organization in Virginia, and one of the oldest and most distinguished history organizations in the nation. For use in its state history museum and its renowned research library, the historical society cares for a collection of nearly nine million items representing the ever-evolving story of Virginia.

At the Cannon’s Mouth: Battlefield Relics and the Making of Civil War Memory

Virginia Museum of History & Culture

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