BiblioVault - Books about Richmond (Va.)

Avenues of Faith

Shaping the Urban Religious Culture of Richmond, Virginia, 1900–1929

Samuel C. Shepherd Jr

University of Alabama Press, 2001

Avenues of Faith documents how religion flourished in southern cities after the turn of the century and how a cadre of clergy and laity created a notably progressive religious culture in Richmond, Virginia. Famous as the former capital of the Confederacy, in Avenues of Faith Richmond emerges as a dynamic and growing industrial city invigorated by the social activism of its Protestants.

By examining six mainline white denominations—Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Disciples of Christ, and Lutherans—Samuel C. Shepherd Jr. emphasizes the extent to which the city fostered religious diversity, even as “blind spots” remained regarding Catholics, African Americans, Mormons, and Jews. Shepherd explores such topics as evangelism, interdenominational cooperation, the temperance campaign, the Sunday school movement, the international peace initiatives, and the expanding role of lay people of both sexes. He also notes the community’s widespread rejection of fundamentalism, a religious phenomenon almost automatically associated with the South, and shows how it nurtured social reform to combat a host of urban problems associated with public health, education, housing, women’s suffrage, prohibition, children, and prisons.

In lucid prose and with excellent use of primary sources, Shepherd delivers a fresh portrait of Richmond Protestants who embraced change and transformed their community, making it an active, progressive religious center of the New South.

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Black Labor in Richmond, 1865-1890

Peter J. Rachleff

University of Illinois Press, 1989

Civil War Weather in Virginia

Robert K. Krick

University of Alabama Press, 2007

This work fills a tremendous gap in our available knowledge in a fundamental area of Civil War studies, that of basic quotidian information on the weather in the theater of operations in the vicinity of Washington, DC, and Richmond, Virginia. Krick adds to the daily records kept by amateur meteorologists in these two locations. Anecdotal descriptions of weather found in contemporary soldiers’ dairies and correspondence combines these scattered records into a chronology of weather information that also includes daybreak and sunset times for each day. The information in Civil War Weather in Virginia is indispensable for students of the Civil War in the vital northern Virginia/Maryland theater of operations, and of the effects of weather on military history in general.

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The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership

Gordon Blaine Hancock, 1884–1970

Raymond Gavins

Duke University Press, 1993

The Perils and Prospects of Southern Black Leadership fills an important gap in uncovering the history of southern black leaders between the death of Booker T. Washington and the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. Originally published to critical acclaim in 1977 (Duke University Press), and now available in paperback with a new preface by the author, this book provides an intellectual biography of Gordon Blaine Hancock, a Virginia educator, journalist, and minister whose writings and speeches on race relations were widely influential in the South in the thirty years prior to the Brown decision of 1954. In showing how Hancock faced his generation's main dilemma—how to end Jim Crow and ensure integration without abandoning ideals of black identity, independence, and solidarity—Raymond Gavins's biography illuminates the history of African Americans and race relations in America.

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Refugitta of Richmond

The Wartime Recollections, Grave and Gay, of Constance Cary Harrison

Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and S. Kittrell Rushing

University of Tennessee Press, 2011

In the expansive canon of Civil War memoirs, relatively few accounts from women exist. Among the most engaging and informative of these rare female perspectives is Constance Cary Harrison’s Recollections Grave and Gay, a lively, first-person account of the collapse of the Confederacy by the wife of President Jefferson Davis’s private secretary. Although equal in literary merit to the well-known and widely available diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Eliza Frances Andrews, Harrison’s memoir failed to remain in print after its original publication in 1916 and, as a result, has been lost to all but the most diligent researcher. In Refugitta of Richmond, Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. and S. Kittrell Rushing resurrect Harrison’s work, reintroducing an especially insightful perspective on the Southern high command, the home front, and the Confederate elite.

Born into an old, aristocratic Virginia family in 1843, Constance Cary fled with her family from their estate near Alexandria, Virginia, to Richmond in 1862. There, the nineteen-year-old met Burton Norvell Harrison, a young math professor from the University of Mississippi who had come to the Confederate capital to work for Davis. The pair soon became engaged and joined the inner circle of military, political, and social leaders at the Confederate White House. Under the pen name “Refugitta,” Constance also wrote newspaper columns about the war and became a respected member of Richmond’s literary community.

Fifty years later, Constance used her wartime diaries and letters to pen her recollections of her years in Richmond and of the confusing months immediately after the war. She offers lucid, insightful, and detailed observations of the Confederate home front even as she reflects on the racial and class biases characteristic of her time and station. With an informative introduction and thorough annotations by Hughes and Rushing, Refugitta of Richmond provides a highly readable, often amusing, occasionally troubling insider’s look at the Confederate nerve center and its ultimate demise.

Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes Jr. is the author or editor of twenty books relating to the American Civil War, including The Life and Wars of Gideon J. Pillow; Brigadier General Tyree H. Bell, C.S.A.: Forrest’s Fighting Lieutenant; and Yale’s Confederates.

S. Kittrell Rushing, Frank McDonald Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is the editor of Eliza Frances Andrews’s A Family Secret and Journal of a Georgia Woman, 1870–1872. Rushing also edited and annotated Judge Garnett Andrews’s Reminiscences of an Old Georgia Lawyer.

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Richmond's Priests and Prophets

Race, Religion, and Social Change in the Civil Rights Era

Douglas E. Thompson

University of Alabama Press, 2017

Explores the ways in which white Christian leaders in Richmond, Virginia navigated the shifting legal and political battles around desegregation even as members of their congregations struggled with their own understanding of a segregated society

Douglas E. Thompson’s Richmond’s Priests and Prophets: Race, Religion, and Social Change in the Civil Rights Era presents a compelling study of religious leaders’ impact on the political progression of Richmond, Virginia, during the time of desegregation. Scrutinizing this city as an entry point into white Christians’ struggles with segregation during the 1950s, Thompson analyzes the internal tensions between ministers, the members of their churches, and an evolving world.

In the mid-twentieth-century American South, white Christians were challenged repeatedly by new ideas and social criteria. Neighborhood demographics were shifting, public schools were beginning to integrate, and ministers’ influence was expanding. Although many pastors supported the transition into desegregated society, the social pressure to keep life divided along racial lines placed Richmond’s ministers on a collision course with forces inside their own congregations. Thompson reveals that, to navigate the ideals of Christianity within a complex historical setting, white religious leaders adopted priestly and prophetic roles.

Moreover, the author argues that, until now, the historiography has not viewed white Christian churches with the nuance necessary to understand their diverse reactions to desegregation. His approach reveals the ways in which desegregationists attempted to change their communities’ minds, while also demonstrating why change came so slowly—highlighting the deeply emotional and intellectual dilemma of many southerners whose worldview was fundamentally structured by race and class hierarchies.

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The Spirits of Bad Men Made Perfect

The Life and Diary of Confederate Artillerist William Ellis Jones

Constance Hall Jones

Southern Illinois University Press, 2020

This remarkable biography and edited diary tell the story of William Ellis Jones (1838–1910), an artillerist in Crenshaw’s Battery, Pegram’s Battalion, the Army of Northern Virginia. One of the few extant diaries by a Confederate artillerist, Jones’s articulate writings cover camp life as well as many of the key military events of 1862, including the Peninsula Campaign, the Second Battle of Manassas, the Maryland Campaign, and the Battle of Fredericksburg.

In 1865 Jones returned to his prewar printing trade in Richmond, and his lasting reputation stems from his namesake publishing company’s role in the creation and dissemination of much of the Lost Cause ideology. Unlike the pro-Confederate books and pamphlets Jones published—primary among them the Southern Historical Society Papers—his diary shows the mindset of an unenthusiastic soldier. In a model of contextualization, Constance Hall Jones shows how her ancestor came to embrace an uncritical veneration of the army’s leadership and to promulgate a mythology created by veterans and their descendants who refused to face the amorality of their cause.

Jones brackets the soldier’s diary with rich, biographical detail, profiling his friends and relatives and providing insight into his childhood and post-war years. In doing so, she offers one of the first serious investigations into the experience of a Welsh immigrant family loyal to the Confederacy and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Civil War–era Richmond and the nineteenth-century publishing industry. Invitingly written, The Spirits of Bad Men Made Perfect is an engaging life-and-times story that will appeal to historians and general readers alike.

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We, Too, Are Americans

African American Women in Detroit and Richmond, 1940-54

Megan Taylor Shockley

University of Illinois Press, 2003

During World War II, factories across America retooled for wartime production, and unprecedented labor opportunities opened up for women and minorities. In We, Too, Are Americans, Megan Taylor Shockley examines the experiences of the African American women who worked in two capitols of industry--Detroit, Michigan, and Richmond, Virginia--during the war and the decade that followed it, making a compelling case for viewing World War II as the crucible of the civil rights movement.

As demands on them intensified, the women working to provide American troops with clothing, medical supplies, and other services became increasingly aware of their key role in the war effort. A considerable number of the African Americans among them began to use their indispensability to leverage demands for equal employment, welfare and citizenship benefits, fair treatment, good working conditions, and other considerations previously denied them.

Shockley shows that as these women strove to redefine citizenship, backing up their claims to equality with lawsuits, sit-ins, and other forms of activism, they were forging tools that civil rights activists would continue to use in the years to come.

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