American town form consists of primary form - the layout of streets, lots and other features determined for a town at its inception - and secondary form - the fabric of building and usage that a town acquires over time. This thesis explores the primary and secondary form of ante-bellum Western Virginia Towns, and offers several interpretations of the cultural meaning recorded in town form. / Master of Architecture

This study was concerned with the founding and development of the Adult Education Association of Virginia (AEAV). The principal objectives of the study were to describe the organizational structure of AEAV; examine AEAV’s financial status at selected intervals; appraise the leadership and membership of AEAV; relate AEAV programs and activities to social, economic, and political trends; and explain the relationship of AEAV to other adult education organizations. Sources of information were documents located in the official files of AEAV and the Adult Education Association of the United States of America (AEA/USA), to include minutes, correspondence, financial reports, membership lists, promotional brochures, and newsletters. Information was also collected from newspapers and personal interviews with individuals. Persons interviewed were questioned about events or activities in which they had participated or about which they had specialized knowledge, an approach that did not lend itself to the use of a standard data collection instrument. Following a series of postwar meetings sponsored by the University of Virginia, adult educators gathered in October, 1951, in Richmond, Virginia, and organized AF.AV. From the beginning, AEAV’s principal instrument of program activities was its annual conferences. Regional conferences were used to publicize AEAV programs and to promote adult education. Contact with the membership between conferences was maintained by periodic issues of a newsletter. Operating funds were derived from membership fees, annual conferences, rebates from AEA/USA, and subsidies from state institutions. Membership was never large but, except for women and minorities, it was representative of Virginia adult education activities. Recently, membership composition has changed and it now consists mostly of adult educators representing colleges and universities. AEAV members have chosen to ignore social, economic, and political forces and to concentrate their efforts on the technical aspects of adult education. In spite of a parochial approach to national issues, AEAV has good relations with other adult education organizations. As AEAV entered its fourth decade, members were considering a reorganization to broaden the membership base and to align the organizational structure more closely to that of the national association. Recommendations for further study concerned investigations of other adult education organizations. / Ed. D.

The rationale for a historical study is to record facts from documents and events in an organized manner, so that people of the future may have a better understanding of past events. The Problem The purpose of this research project was to trace the legal and historical development of licensing and certification of public school teachers in the State of Virginia. The main research question investigated: What is the legal history of teacher certification in Virginia? The secondary question investigated: What were the historical events that may have influenced changes in teacher certification in Virginia? Procedures This research was structured within ten time periods beginning with the colonial period of Virginia through the present. An organized search was conducted to locate and analyze the historical documents that pertained to the topic. Conclusions From this study, the following conclusions were drawn as based on this research: 1. The requirement of a license and/or certificate to teach in the State of Virginia can be traced historically to the State’s English heritage and its colonial period. 2. Virginia’s teacher certification has progressed through ten distinct periods. 3. The certification regulations in the State have been influenced directly or indirectly by various political offices both State and national as well as by various domestic and international events. / Ed. D.

In a twenty year period beginning in 1935, Virginia college and state officials reacted to increasing pressure from internal and external forces of change. The movement to desegregate public higher education was a major portion of that pressure. The defenses established by the state during these years reflected the interrelation of these forces and the Democratic Machine's attempt to balance all the forces so as to retain the maximum degree of segregated education at the minimum social, fiscal and political costs. Thus the state leaders used, what I have termed "minimal resistance" to the desegregation of their graduate and professional schools rather than the "massive resistance" that followed Brown v. Board of Education. In the 1930s and 1940s, the state did all it could to retain segregated graduate and professional schools for whites with tuition grants to out-of-state schools and the cost-effective growth at Virginia State College. When these were declared insufficient by the U.S. Supreme Court, Virginia joined with other Southern States in joint educational ventures. By 1950, the Virginia officials realized that segregated higher education was all but a lost cause. They became conciliatory to the forces of desegregation in hopes of saving segregation in primary and secondary education. From 1950 to 1955, a period I call "limited desegregation" existed. During these years, the state's white graduate and professional schools admitted a very small number of black students under the "separate but equal" doctrine. The "Machine's" ability to control press and public debate on desegregation, together with contemporary political events and the attitudes of Virginians, account for the sequence of desegregation events in the state. / Master of Arts

This project analyzes the role of religion, both institutional and private, in Virginia's dealings with witchcraft during the seventeenth century. The witch trials of New England and Europe during the 1600s have tended to overshadow those that simultaneously took place in Virginia, leaving historians to prematurely regard Virginia as an anomaly of rationality in an otherwise superstitious period of witches and demons. Virginia's failure to prosecute those accused of witchcraft was not due to a lack of allegations, my thesis will argue, but can instead be partly attributed to the nature of the colony's religious experience and the theology and practices of Virginia's Anglican Church. While Virginia's seventeenth-century inhabitants migrated to the New World with firmly entrenched English religious values, their relationship with God and their response to the supernatural world were profoundly influenced by New World experiences and peoples. To protect the social fragility of their colony, Virginia's political and religious leaders consciously chose to prosecute offenses that they felt threatened the social cohesion of the colony, such as fornication, gossip, and slander, and dismissed those, such as witchcraft, that threatened to tear it apart. / Master of Arts

No description available.

This project documents the Ludwick-Swope Farmstead's architectural development from 1833 until 1994. Technology, economics, and local preferences all impacted this process. There was no set year when the farm "appeared" in full blown form. The evolution occurred over many decades.House histories and county histories are common in Rockbridge County, but no research has focused on farmstead history. Court records, historic photographs, area histories, the farmstead, and oral histories were examined. Each source provided information on the farmsteads development. This information was combined into a historic structures report, which documents the findings and the farmstead's current condition.Complete farmsteads are becoming scarce and few people remember what structures were once part of a working farm. Although some museums have farmstead reconstructions, no attempt has been made to show farmstead development over a broad period of time. This paper was designed to remedy this oversight by documenting one farmsteads development through the past century and a half. / Department of Architecture

In 1860, Patrick County. like the rest of Virginia and much of the South. wavered uneasily on the brink of secession. In a county where large planters were few, secession was not overwhelmingly popular. Slaveholding families, however, constituted almost one quarter of the white population in Patrick, as they did across the South, and when Virginia seceded. Patrick Countians flocked to serve in the Confederate Army. Although situated in Virginia, Patrick managed to escape physical decimation from war. In fact, no battles occurred in the county and Federal troops only invaded the county once in four years. Nevertheless, the Civil War came home to Patrick in a variety of ways: men were killed, livestock and crops impressed, and farms destroyed. With its prosperity of the 1850's disrupted by the war. Patrick's agricultural output dramatically decreased, industry failed, and labor shortages ensued. Despite the changes the Civil War brought to Patrick, the highest echelon of Patrick's social structure changed little. Those white men who had been well off before the war continued to flourish and continued to own the most and most valuable real estate. Small farmers before the war generally remained small farmers. Free blacks did not gain much status over the decades, and freedmen owned scarcely any land nor personal property; neither group by 1880 had achieved literacy. In Patrick County the rich stayed rich and the planters remained the most influential. / Master of Arts

The release of the Monument Avenue Commission Report in July, 2018 was the culmination of over one year of research and collaboration with community members of Richmond, Virginia on how the city should approach the contentious history of Monument Avenue’s five Confederate centerpieces. What the monuments have symbolized within the predominately rich, white neighborhood and outside of its confines has been a matter of debate ever since they were unveiled, but the recent publicity accorded to Confederate monuments has led to considerations by historians, city leaders, and the public regarding recontextualization of Confederate monuments. Recontextualization of the monuments should not only consider the city’s current constituency, but also the lives, testimonies, and representations of Richmond’s African- American residents as the monuments were built. A comparative case study of photographs from various institutional archives in Richmond, Virginia, depicting late- nineteenth and early twentieth-century scenes from the city’s history reveals that while Monument Avenue and its Confederate celebrations benefitted the city’s upper-class white constituency, its messages extended far beyond Richmond and its Confederate veterans. By bringing to light images and testimonies from the archive that highlight African-American presence, a counter-narrative emerges detailing the construction of power in post-Reconstruction Richmond through Monument Avenue.

In mid-November, 1775, Lord Dunmore last Royal Governor of Virginia attempted to enlist the support of rebel owned slaves to crush Patriot resistance to Great Britain. This study examines the slaveholders' response to Dunmore's actions. Virginia's slaveholders fought a counter-revolution in order to maintain traditional race relations in the colony. Patriot propaganda portrayed Dunmore as a race traitor, who became symbolically more "black" than white. Slaveholders characterized Dunmore as a rebel, a madman, and a sexual deviant - stereotypes normally given to slaves by their "masters." Since Dunmore threatened to destroy the defining institution of slavery, planters sought to salvage their identities by defending the paternalistic philosophy and racist assumptions upon which slave society was based. Planters overwhelmingly became Patriots to protect slavery. / Department of History