American City, Southern Place: Richmond on the Eve of War

On March 10, 2011, Gregg Kimball delivered a Banner Lecture entitled "American City, Southern Place: Richmond on the Eve of War." As a city of the upper South intimately connected to northeastern cities, the southern slave trade, and the Virginia countryside, Richmond embodied many of the contradictions of mid-nineteenth-century America. Gregg Kimball depicts the Richmond community as a series of dynamic, overlapping networks, showing how various groups of residents—immigrants and natives, free people and slaves, those high born and low—understood themselves and their society within this web of experience. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and private letters, Dr. Kimball elicits new perspectives on the nature of antebellum society and the coming of the Civil War. Gregg Kimball is director of education and outreach at the Library of Virginia and the author of American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond. This lecture is cosponsored with the Richmond National Battlefield Park. (Introduction by Paul A. Levengood) The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.