Author Interview--Jonathan Noyalas (Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley) Part 2

Hello H-CivWar readers,

today we continue our multipart video interview series with Jonathan Noyalas. Our focus today is on slavery and the enslaved in the Shenandoah Valley. We talk about what slavery looked like as well as why it has become forgotten.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Jonathan Noyalas via Zoom. We talked about his new book Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era, which was released by the University Press of Florida. The interview is broken up so that you can easily use the material in class.

Jonathan Noyalas is a graduate of Virginia Tech and Director of the McCormick Civil War Institute at Shenandoah University. He is the author or editor of eleven books on the Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley. He has written over a hundred articles in both scholarly and popular publications. 

These videos are also available on this Playlist

We start our conversation with the frustration when the sources do not provide closure to stories:

We turn to how the Lost Cause helped in the forgetting of slavery in the Shenandoah Valley:

We briefly detour with a question about Lost Cause-influenced submissions to the Journal of the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era:

We close today with a question of what slavery looked like in the Shenandoah Valley: