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Three talks and free pizza to boot
September will be a busy month for me with three talks scheduled, all in Fauquier County, all free and open to the public. And one includes a free lunch. That’s right, you can hear me and enjoy some pizza. On Tuesday, Sept. 19, at 1 p.m., I’ll be in The Plains, Va., at the Afro-American
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Discomfort? Yes, that was a goal
When a friend suggested that Condemned for Love might be banned, I didn’t think much about it. When a second person said the same thing about a week later, I took note. “It struck me again and again how your book would be banned in several states because it tells an ugly truth,” my friend
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Twice he challenged the lynchers
Of all the characters in Condemned for Love, Colly Pattie strikes me as one of the most interesting. Colly was witness to two lynchings, tried to stop them and failed both times. Colly was 17 and asleep in the family quarters in the county jail in Warrenton when the first lynching occurred. His father, Horace,
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A single tombstone confirms the spot
One of the curious features of Dr. Augustus Horner’s drawing of the Arthur Jordan lynching is his placement of a single tombstone in his sketch. A single tombstone in the Warrenton Cemetery? The place is enormous. Perhaps Horner meant it as representative of the many other markers there. No, Horner drew what he saw. If
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A visit to the site of Jordan’s murder
I made a promise to myself early on to be all in for this book-writing adventure, to embrace the discomfort of learning new skills. For example, I’ve had to think and rethink how to structure a 35,000-word story, how to create a worthy deck of PowerPoint slides, and how to master new computer programs. I
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Mosby chose to defend a corrupt vision
There are more than 8,000 graves in the Warrenton Cemetery, but none is as popular as the grave of Col. John S. Mosby. Mosby’s grave is a place of pilgrimage, a tribute to the famed soldier. And I don’t understand why. Mosby was a legendary Confederate cavalry officer, the “Gray Ghost,” whose guerrilla tactics bedeviled
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‘Night and Fog’ and Elvira Corder
When Steve Watkins described the German terror tactic, “Night and Fog,” I snapped to attention. Steve is a retired professor at the University of Mary Washington, the author of 12 books and a longtime friend. I sat beside his wife, Janet Watkins, for many years in the newsroom at the Free Lance-Star. Steve and I
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Two takeaways from the book’s launch
Sometimes I circle a distant date on my calendar, and it seems to never arrive. Monday, July 17, was such a date, and, praise be, it finally came. History Press has officially published my new book, Condemned for Love in Old Virginia: The Lynching of Arthur Jordan, and it’s now available from your favorite seller.
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Recipe for this book: Gather, write, bleed
I think of my new book as unique since it is the only writing project for which I spilled blood. It happened in western Maryland on a cold Sunday in December 2019. I was on a scouting trip for what would become Condemned for Love in Old Virginia, my new book. I had visited the
Author & Lecturer
Jim Hall 