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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