The deadline for the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book’s Poetry & Prose contest for High School and Middle School students is fast approaching. So get your up to 1,000 word story or up to two single-spaced pages of poetry in by February 12 at 5pm to the Festival headquarters at 145 Edham Drive in (...)
UVA English professor and poet Lisa Russ Spaar is one of 12 Virginia higher-ed teachers to receive a 2010 Outstanding Faculty Award. Recipients are chosen by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia and the philanthropic arm of Dominion Resources, which chips in a $5,000 check to go with the (...)
Library trustee Timothy Tolson and director John Halliday listen to grim words from Anthony Townsend.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER
Not only is Crozet not getting the mammoth new library it was expecting, a possible ten percent budget cut might mean closure of the library it already enjoys, and (...)
Cal Otto, one of three men who founded the Virginia Festival of the Book in 1994, died November 23 in Colorado Springs at age 79.
"He and I and Tom Dowd are typically credited with starting it," says Heartwood Books owner Paul Collinge, "but the actual ball got started when he walked into the (...)
Women’s Rights and the Struggle for Equal Adulthood in America, 1792-1939 Field recently earned her Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. She has taught in the University of Virginia’s Studies in Women and Gender program and is completing a book on the political significance of adulthood. In (...)
The 313-acre Ingles Ferry Farm, site of a New River crossing operated by Mary Draper Ingles, the pioneer woman whose incredible trek back from her kidnapping by Shawnee warriors inspired Follow the River, the 1981 best-seller (that just happens to be the favorite book of late banking icon Hovey Dabney), (...)
Paul W. Cherington Professor of Business Administration at Harvard. Bruce R. Scott, explores how public policy has effected the business environment in the last several years…and how a misunderstanding of capitalism may have lead to the recent economic instability. February 12, 11am, at the Miller Center. Scott’s newest book is The Concept of Capitalism (Springer, 2009).
Connecticut College history prof Michael Burlingame, an Abraham Lincoln scholar, discusses the life of the famous President at the Miller Center on February 15 at 11am. He is the author of author of Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2 vols.; Johns Hopkins, 2008) and The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (University of Illinois Press, 1994).
Update: Rescheduled from February 10 to February 17 due to the weather.
John P. Kaminski, founder and director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, presents selections from his new biography The Great Virginia Triumvirate: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison in the Eyes of Their Contemporaries at the New Dominion Bookshop on Wednesday, February 10 at 12:15pm.
Taken from letters, speeches, diaries, and memoirs, the quotations and vignettes included here shed light on the actual person behind each public image. George Washington offering a bowl of hot tea at night to a guest at Mount Vernon who has a cold; Thomas Jefferson extending condolences to John Adams on the death of his wife, Abigail; and James Madison bequeathing the silver-hilted walking cane, left him by Jefferson, in turn to the third president’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph—such moments reveal personality and character in a way that no official act ever could.
“Much is known to one which is not known to the other,” Jefferson wrote, “and no one knows everything.” The cumulative effect of many voices, however, can create a portrait of invaluable insight.
“Kaminski is an extremely well informed guide through the tangled tale of our political origins…. This book, clearly a labor of love, represents his distilled wisdom of the three great Virginians—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.”—Joseph J. Ellis, Mount Holyoke College, author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
Authors and media watchers John Nichols and Robert McChesney discuss the state of American journalism at the Miller Center on February 19 at 11am. Nichols, a correspondent for The Nation, and McChesney, who teaches in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, co-wrote a book called Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (New Press, 2006)
