ForewordIN 1985 the Valentine set out to create a new history of Richmond, Virginia, one to be based upon the finest scholarship in urban and social history and written for the general reader. For the first time Richmond was to be studied within the context of national and international urban systems. The new history would include whole groups of its residents -- African Americans, women,Jews, evangelical Christians, and working people -- and entire eras previously considered marginal to Richmond's familiar history as a state capital, capital of the Confederacy, and mid-twentieth-century stronghold of massive resistance.The Valentine Board of Trustees and the museum staff made the new history of Richmond the keystone of an ambitious exhibition agenda over the next nine years. Each exhibition articulated new architecture for Richmond history and was presented as a work in progress toward the new history. This unity of purpose gave the museum's work a coherence and accountability that enabled it to seek and receive the support necessary to embark on so lengthy and consuming a project.During a residency program supported by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy in Charlottesville, Virginia, Valentine staff members met Dr. Marie Tyler-McGraw, a student of the history and folklore of the Upper South and a published writer. While a Fellow at the National Museum of American History, she had also conducted extensive research on Richmond history. Soon thereafter Dr. Tyler-McGraw joined the museum staff full-time, with principal responsibility for writing this book. While drafting and presenting succes..ive chapters of the book to her colleagues at the museum for review and comment, she also contributed her expertise to the development and critiques of interpretive projects at the Valentine.One of the most exciting and rewarding products of the Valentine's research and interpretation since 1985 has been the explosion in the number of new visitors drawn by the nature of the exhibitions and by public programs that seek their viewpoints, knowledge, experiences, and opinions. These exhibitions have brought Richmond and the Valentine national and international acclaim in newspapers, magazines, professional journals, and television, both for their unflinching focus on topics once deemed too incendiary to discuss publicly or dismissed as insignificant. The Valentine today has become a significant crossroads and gathering point for the entire Richmond community. It is no longer in fact or fancy the bastion of a privileged elite.From Resistance to Renaissance: Race Relations in Richmond, 1945-1985 broke the taboo on public analysis of this difficult aspect of the city's history. Free to Profess addressed the relationship between the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the first century of Jewish life in Richmond. Jackson Ward: A Century of Community examined one of the two most important black communities in the South.In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black Life in Richmond, the first major study comparing the lives of free blacks and slaves in the Western hemisphere before the Civil War, looked at the power of cities to erode the system of slavery; the place of African Americans in a market economy; and their central and essential role in Richmond's development. Jim Crow examined the rise of racist thought and practice in the last decades of the nineteenth century, along with the intensification of anti-Semitism in the Commonwealth after the Civil War.Women's history came to the fore in Dressed for Work: Women in the Workforce, 1900-1989, a commentary on the social history of various women's roles and their place in the working world. The enormous impact of a variety of Protestant Christians on Richmond since the city's beginnings was explored in I Believe: Evangelicalism in Southern Urban Culture. And most recently, Shared Spaces, Separate Lives looked at nineteenth-century race relations within the context of urban households composed of free masters and slave servants -- a condition at once of utmost intimacy and absolute isolation. Creating History (1994) begins an effort to distinguish between the past and the discipline of history and to present a popular exegesis of the epistemology of history.In all, the long road to At the Falls has been a tremendously gratifying intellectual and community odyssey for the Valentine, one that called forth the finest efforts of Valentine historians, curators, conservators, designers, educators, development officers, and the entire museum staff. With this new history, we celebrate all the people of Richmond past and present whose special contributions built and today sustain this rich, complex, and fascinating city.In history there is never a last word, and Richmond's past, present, and future are destined to be reconsidered many times. Another Richmond decades hence will demand its own account. The Valentine proudly presents this version, for our time, in this place.
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