New Book Releases

Richmond is a classic Southern city, most notable as the Confederate capitol. However, the irony of Richmond is that much of its beautiful architecture was built by Black laborers.

The city's vast and varied collection of architecture provides an archive of African American history, both of enslaved and free peoples. Author Selden Richardson explains how iconic symbols of old Richmond and the generations of Black laborers who helped assemble it are embodied in both the preserved and the forgotten architecture of the city. After you finish this book, it will be as if the buildings in Richmond tell their own stories to you.

Long before the adventures of John Rolfe and Pocahontas, Spanish ships reached Virginia's shore. In the centuries that followed, Hispanics and Latinos settled in Virginia to seek new opportunities away from home. The 1980s saw the beginnings of el Nuevo Sur, or the New South, as Virginia's Latin American population surged. Since then, the now-defunct Virginia Center for Latin American Art briefly showcased Virginia's Latino and Hispanic evolving arts heritage. Restaurants like Pollo Campero and La Tasca have joined the local culinary scene, and schools and churches have forged plans for their changing communities. Join author Christine Stoddard as she traces the vibrant history and culture of Hispanics and Latinos in Virginia.

In many ways, the story of bondage in Virginia is the story of the state itself...

Richmond's 15th Street was known as Wall Street in antebellum times, and like its New York counterpart, it was a center of commerce. But the business done here was unspeakable and the scene heart wrenching. With over sixty-nine slave dealers and auction houses, the Wall Street area saw tens of millions of dollars and countless human lives change hands, fueling the southern economy. Local historian and author Jack Trammell traces the history of the city's slave trade, from the origins of African slavery in Virginia to its destruction at the end of the Civil War. Stories of seedy slave speculators and corrupt traders are placed alongside detailed accounts of the economic, political and cultural impact of a system representing the most immense, concentrated human suffering in our nation's history.

With a forward by Elizabeth Thalhimer Smartt, learn about William Thalhimer's elaborate plan to save Jewish Germans from Hitler and the Third Reich.

During Hitler's rise to power in the 1930's, Richmond department store founder, William Thalhimer and his family traveled to Germany to visit relatives and business contacts. Thalhimer was deeply disturbed and increasingly alarmed as the anti-Semitism that he and his family witnessed escalated into the violence Brown Shirts and Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. Thalhimer became determined to aid Jews fleeing from Germany, and he eventually met a representative of Gross Breesen, a German-Jewish agricultural training institute. The mission of Gross Breesen, and eventually Thalhimer, was to train young Jews in agriculture in hopes that the expertise gained would ensure the students' successful emigration from Germany. Thalhimer purchased a farm, Hyde Farmlands, in Burkeville, Virginia to give the students a home in Virginia.

Sitting just south of the nation's capital, Alexandria has a long and storied history." "Still, little is known of Alexandria's twentieth-century African American community. Experience the harrowing narratives of trials and triumph as Alexandria's African Americans helped to shape not only their hometown but also the world around them. Rutherford Adkins became one of the first black fighter pilots as a Tuskegee Airman. Samuel Tucker, a twenty-six-year-old lawyer, organized and fought for Alexandria to share its wealth of knowledge with the African American community by opening its libraries to all colors and creeds. Discover a vibrant past that, through this record, will be remembered forever as Alexandria's beacon of hope and light."