From Virginia: The State That Made a Nation

A provocative historical, cultural, and personal reckoning with Virginia, the state at the heart of America’s foundation and its greatest contradictions—from an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author

Everyone is from somewhere, but some people are lucky enough to be from somewhere. A place they can announce and everyone who hears knows something about it. Growing up, Mychal Denzel Smith wished he was from somewhere that wasn’t Virginia. For Smith, it felt like a cultural void with a confounding history: Virginia is where slave ships first landed in America, and it’s the first state to have elected a Black governor in Douglas Wilder. Therein lies the tension at the heart of the American project, all tracing back to Virginia.

In From Virginia, Smith traverses several centuries of Virginia history, dealing with major historical figures, pop culture, sports, and present-day politics that define a state neglected by the larger world that it has helped to create. Virginia, for better and worse, has produced the artists and intellectuals that have defined American culture from inception—from the hypocrisy-laden ideas of democracy expressed by Thomas Jefferson, the violent search for liberation embodied by Nat Turner, the use of God as a means of oppression found in the ascent of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, the sonic innovation of artists as wide ranging from Patsy Cline to Missy Elliott and D’Angelo, and the literary exploration of America’s soul found in the work of William Styron, Tom Wolfe, and Willa Cather. From Virginia asks how we can fold all of those competing ideas into the understanding of ourselves and warns us that to ignore the lessons Virginia has taught us is at our peril.

A stirring, lyrical blend of history, cultural criticism, and memoir, From Virginia is a journey toward a sense of self that can only be found by going back to the source.