Subject: The Sixth Virginia Forum in Lexington
Date: Thursday 3 February 2011. 5:05 pm.
To: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
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From: Jim Glanville <[log in to unmask]>
Fellow List Members:
Many of you already know that the sixth Virginia History Forum will be
held in western Virginia at Lexington on 24-26 March. A recently updated
Forum program can be reached via the link
http://virginiaforum.org/conference.html.
The 2011 Forum features about 40 sessions of presentations and meets on
its first full day at Washington and Lee University and on its second
day at Virginia Military Institute. Representative session titles
include: "Civil War Archival Collections in Virginia," "Virginia in
Literature," "Old Virginia/New Virginia: The Passing of Massive
Resistance," "The Archeology of Liminality: Studying the Intersection of
Different Virginias," "Native American History and Culture," "Early
Republican Virginia," and "Documentary Filmmaking and Local History."
As many readers of this list will know, this writer is of the opinion
that western Virginia is fully as historic as the coastal plain. The
region's significance is illustrated by the pioneering settlement of
western Virginia by Scotch-Irish and German emigrants beginning circa
1740, the events of the French and Indian War, Dunmore's War, and its
subsequent evolution as a funnel for the hundreds of thousands of
Virginians who moved west, carrying with them their culture and
political institutions to newly created states. For the latter see David
Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly's "Bound Away: Virginia and the
Westward Movement" ( Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000).
Washington and Lee University has been described as being the
"Scotch-Irish University of the South" as well as the "…temple of the
wilderness as the school for the training of Scotch-Irish prophets?"
Henry Alexander White ("The Scotch-Irish in America," Cincinnati: R.
Clarke, 1890, 223-246; on line at
http://books.google.com/books?id=KInXAAAAMAAJ and reprinted at
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/scotsirish/congress2-17.htm.
Sadly, while Lexington can claim to be one of the hearths of
Scotch-Irish culture in Virginia, I have to report that searching the
2011 Forum program yields not a single instance of either the word Irish
or the word Scotch.
Oh well, there's always 2012.
Jim Glanville
Blacksburg.
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