This is a recent TED talk that took place in Richmond. I assume that the maps utilized in Professor Ayers’s presentation come from the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab, which is an incredible resource.
Uploaded to Vimeo on December 10, 2013.
Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth
“Levin’s study is the first of its kind to blueprint and then debunk the mythology of enslaved African Americans who allegedly served voluntarily in behalf of the Confederacy.”–Journal of Southern History
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Yes opening part at least, from the lab. Attended society of civil war historians meeting in Richmond. Struck up a conversation with ayers. Didn’t recognize him although was pretty familiar with his valley of the shadow project. Said was giving demos and invited me to come along as he was going to the lab. It took a while to figure out he want the lab chief but dean of the university . Really a nice guy. Basic problem he was facing was processing unstructured data. Doing much manually. Big data, Hadoop, have matured since then. Hopefully something he is experimenting with.
This is exactly the way I learned it Same way Dr Ayers presented it, but I was also taught that Virginia remained in the Union until President Lincon ordered an army of 75,000 to invade the Confederate states. Otherwise, she would never have seceded. It was not a popular suggestion.
Ayers offered a very general overview of Richmond in the Civil War for the sake of time and his larger point. You are right that Virginia did not secede until after Lincoln’s call for soldiers. Whether Virginia would have seceded is, of course, unknown.
“. . . and Oregon Hill, which got its name because it’s way off in the west and no one’s ever going to live there.”
Hah!
Speaking as an Oregonian, I can tell you definitively, they were wrong.