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‘Impossible Love’ will arrive soon
The page proofs arrived last week, so my contribution to a new book on lynching in Virginia will soon be a reality. The University of Virginia Press will publish Lynching in Virginia: Racial Terror and its Legacy this spring. Prof. Gianluca De Fazio, an associate professor at James Madison University, is the editor. De Fazio
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Handwriting so bad even AI can’t crack it
It happens often, as it did this month in Hagerstown, Md., when a person asked me, “What about Elvira? What happened to her?” Elvira and her disappearance are the most mysterious aspect of the Arthur Jordan story. For me, however, Dr. Gustavus Horner has second place locked down. As I recounted in Condemned for Love,
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New U.Va. book to include Jordan story
I know the rule: Don’t draw conclusions from a small sample size. But I’m tempted to do so, given my experience with two types of publishers, a commercial publisher and an academic one. I see the one, the commercial publisher, as similar to a rocket-docket court system: Move ’em in, move ’em out. The other,
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The Maryland connection
As the title says, Condemned for Love is a Virginia story. But after preparing for last night’s talk in Hagerstown, I realized how much it is also a Maryland story. I revised my deck of PowerPoint slides before appearing at the Washington County Free Library. I was part of its McCauley Lecture Program, and I
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The start is somewhere in the middle
“The rumble of the horses woke the dog first, and the dog woke Charles Martin.” I started Condemned for Love in Old Virginia with that sentence and decided last week to start my talk that way too. I was to speak at the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier and wanted to try something different. Usually,
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Elvira? To her, only one possibility
I tried, goodness knows I tried. I spent months if not years trying to figure out what happened to Elvira Corder. The best I could do was an educated guess, speculation born of all that research. That’s why I’m so surprised when I meet someone who speaks with certainty about Elvira’s fate. It’s happened twice,
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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
Author & Lecturer
Jim Hall 