Richmond is the city of Monument Avenue and Jackson Ward, the Lost Cause and the Civil Rights struggle. It is, in short, a city with many histories. Richmonders have often presented their city as a place where visitors can travel back into the past. The \u201cOld Virginia capitol of Richmond…offers you escape, not only in miles but in time!,\u201d declared a city guidebook of 1947.<\/p>\n
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The postcards assembled here illustrate how, for most the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Richmond mattered as the city of the founding fathers. Postcards reproduced images of George Washington\u2019s statue on the grounds of Jefferson\u2019s capitol and St. John\u2019s Church, where Patrick Henry demanded \u201cGive me Liberty or Give me Death.\u201d At the same time, the city glorified its Confederate heroes. One popular postcard depicted 600 white schoolchildren assembled as a human Dixie flag on the steps of the Robert E. Lee Monument.<\/p>\n
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At the end of the twentieth century, the statue of African American, barrier-breaking, tennis great Arthur Ashe appeared on Richmond postcards. But the darker history of slavery and the slave trade has proved more difficult to represent. Today we ask, can the city of history be a place of reckoning and reconciliation as well as escape?<\/p>\n
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