Upcoming Events

Wednesday, January 29, 2025
5pm in UVA's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

On Wednesday, January 29, 2025, Professor Christa Dierksheide will discuss her new book, Beyond Jefferson: the Hemingses, the Randolphs, and the Making of Nineteenth Century America (Yale University Press, 2024), in the UVA Special Collections Library auditorium!

From the publisher's page: "Historian Christa Dierksheide examines the lives and experiences of a rising generation of Jefferson’s descendants, Black and white, illuminating how they redefined equality and independence in a world that was half a century removed from the American Revolution. The Hemingses and Randolphs moved beyond Jefferson and his eighteenth-century world, leveraging their own ideas and experiences in nineteenth-century Britain, China, Cuba, Mexico, and the American West to claim independence and equal rights in an imperial and slaveholding republic."

This event is free and open to the public. Paid parking is available nearby at the Central Grounds Parking Garage located near the UVA bookstore. 

Wednesday, March 5, 2025
5pm in UVA's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library

On Wednesday, March 5, 2025, Robert Colby, assistant professor of history at the University of Mississippi, will discuss his new book, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South (Oxford University Press, 2024), in the UVA Special Collections Library auditorium! 

From the publisher's page: "As An Unholy Traffic shows, slave trading helped Southerners survive and fight the Civil War, as well as to build the future for which they fought. They mitigated the crises the war spawned by buying and selling enslaved people, using this commerce to navigate food shortages, unsettled gender roles, the demands of military service, and other hardships on the homefront. Some Rebels speculated wildly in human property, investing in slaves to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding nation they hoped to create. Others traded people to counter the advance of emancipation. Given its centrality to their nationhood, Confederates went to great lengths to prolong the slave trade, which, in turn, supported the Confederacy. For those held in slavery, the surviving slave trade dramatically shaped their pursuit of freedom, inserting a retrograde movement into some people's journeys toward liberty while inspiring others to make the risky decision to escape."

This event is free and open to the public. Paid parking is available nearby at the Central Grounds Parking Garage located near the UVA bookstore. 

Friday, April 11, 2025
9:30am to 4pm, Small Special Collections Library

The Nau Civil War Center's 2025 Annual Conference will take place on Friday, April 11, 2025, in UVA's Small Special Collections Library auditorium. The conference will focus on Reconstruction, and it will feature presentations by Hannah Rosen, Justene Hill Edwards, Manisha Sinha, Kidada E. Williams, and Calvin Schermerhorn. It will be free and open to the public. Stay tuned for more details!