In this conversation, I catch up with Robert (\u201cBob\u201d) Vernon, a friend who\u2019s had a few lifetimes\u2019 worth of fascinating and non-linear careers both before and after our time together in grad school at the University of Virginia, back in the \u201970s. His latest scholarly venture takes him far from his more recent jobs, returning him to earlier passions \u2014 but enriched by decades of skills.<\/p>\n Last summer, Bob published an essay in a book exploring the sorrows, sufferings, and successes of free Black residents of rural Virginia long before the Civil War. The book \u2014\u00a0The Evolution of a Rural Free Black Community: Goochland County, Virginia, 1782-1832<\/a><\/em> (edited by Peter S. Onuf; University of Virginia Press, 2025) \u2014 was authored by Reginald D. Butler, but published posthumously after his death in 2019<\/a>. A group of colleagues, friends, and admirers updated the text from Butler\u2019s earlier dissertation.<\/p>\n Why revise an unfinished draft manuscript for publication now, some 36 years after the original dissertation?<\/p>\n Clearly, Butler\u2019s thesis was no ordinary work. As the second director of the University of Virginia\u2019s Carter G. Woodson Institute<\/a>, Reginald Butler was widely respected as a Black studies scholar, and his \u201cinfluential and much-cited but never published dissertation at Johns Hopkins University\u201d still offers much to teach us about community formation among the free Black population of Virginia in the late 18th-early 19th centuries.<\/p>\n As his publisher writes, \u201cHis innovative and meticulous research in county and state archives . . . showed that community formation emerged in response to an oppressive, often violent regime of racial domination, yet it also depended on the critical role free Black people played in the local economy and their ability to sustain reciprocally beneficial working relations with their white neighbors. . . Butler\u2019s revelatory study offers still fresh perspectives on race and slavery in the formative decades of Virginian and American history.\u201d <\/p>\n In a lengthy essay that follows Butler\u2019s manuscript, Bob adds: \u201cButler\u2019s work is notably successful in revealing the intimate interactions that intertwined Black and white families as communities\u201d (p. 155).<\/p>\n Bob\u2019s contribution to the volume, \u201cCourthouse Custom as an Archival Filter: Comparing Goochland Sources with Other Central Virginia Counties,\u201d is its own tour de force<\/em>. The dry title conceals significant insights into the many new sources of data now available to researchers eager to understand the pre-Civil War-era lives of both White and Black Virginians, both free and enslaved. Bob has consulted coroners\u2019 inquisitions, tax records, apprenticeship indentures, police records, and other other loose papers that were packed into cardboard boxes when removed from various Virginia courthouses. The Library of Virginia has organized these records into a manuscript collection, many of which are newly-available as digital documents. All these were unavailable to Reginald Butler when he was researching his thesis.<\/p>\n Bob\u2019s goal in enumerating these new sources is decidedly altruistic: he aims \u201cto promote future regional studies of free Black life in Virginia in Butler\u2019s spirit.\u201d That, Bob has surely done. As the book\u2019s editor writes, \u201cRobert Vernon\u2019s comprehensive essay on accessible sources in the digital age celebrates Butler\u2019s extraordinary achievement as a researcher but also emphasizes the limitations of the evidence he had to work with. By showing where new evidence might take us now, Vernon pays tribute to Butler, his friend, collaborator, and unofficial mentor (p. viii).\u201d<\/p>\n I suggested above that Bob Vernon\u2019s career path has not taken the path of a simple, straight arrow. Fieldworking archaeologist. Volleyball coach. Expert on gunflints. Elementary school gym teacher. Computer systems analyst\/administrator supporting intelligence and geospatial analysts.\u00a0Technical consultant to astronomers. Mapmaker. Archivist. Grandfather. Not necessarily in that order. <\/p>\n So, I wondered how all those varied career skills informed the remarkable archival research Bob did into Virginia\u2019s free Black population. To begin our conversation, I brought us back to the intellectual hothouse of a graduate program at the University of Virginia that trained us both. (Our regular faculty included Victor Turner, Roy Wagner, David Sapir, Chris Crocker, Ravindra Khare, and other brilliant anthropologists, while visiting faculty included Mary Douglas, Rodney Needham, Roy Willis, and other renowned scholars.)<\/p>\n Alma (AG):<\/strong> In this book, you\u2019ve contributed an essay about Butler\u2019s archival research. But, you were trained long ago as an archaeologist in an anthropology department that had more of a focus on cultural anthropology \u2014 so,\u00a0you brought an intriguing set of perspectives to a historian\u2019s work.\u00a0How did that dual training shape your response to Butler\u2019s project?<\/p>\n Bob (RV):<\/strong> In his manuscript, Reginald attempted to articulate an understanding of the dynamics of a society that today is as alien to us as rural Venezuela was from suburban United States in the 1970s.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure I was much of a student in grad school, but I suppose I was able to relate a portion of what we all read and discussed to my own demons.\u00a0Internalized, the same thinking and processes for resolving my own issues assisted me in imagining and, perhaps, understanding a little how to translate the differences of lived 18th- & 19th-century experiences into ideas and processes with current meaning.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n AG:<\/strong> So, in effect, you were thinking about the past as a cultural community, and the archives were your fieldsite. I love that.<\/p>\n You mentioned Venezuela as a case-in-point analogy of a society that challenged understanding because of its difference. I know that after finishing your B.A. in history from the University of Virginia, you joined the Peace Corps and spent two years volunteering in Venezuela, before you started grad school. Back in 1975, I remember you talking about your experiences in Venezuela with immediacy, as if you had just left Latin America (though you\u2019d already been back in the U.S. for nearly two years). But since you\u2019d joined the program in archaeology rather than cultural anthropology at U VA, I think I assumed you\u2019d fundamentally shifted your thinking. I never asked you what you were still bringing with you to our doctoral program from Venezuela.<\/p>\n RV<\/strong>: I had horrendous reverse culture shock when I returned from Venezuela in January 1973.\u00a0 In one day, I went from bright blue mountain skies and a community where everyone knew me, to thick banks of gray clouds when I landed at Newark. I returned to Charlottesville after a few months reconnecting with my parents. I had friends here, and I met their friends. But I couldn\u2019t talk to people \u2014 that is, carry on a casual conversation. I imagine I was pretty intense.<\/p>\n I was also paranoid when I went into grocery stores, feeling naked in public by allowing the world to see everything I was taking home to eat.\u00a0Two years of small purchases at local bodegas<\/em>, at the carnicero<\/em>, and mercados<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 intimate transactions \u2014 were now public.\u00a0 Believe me, I did not have to read about the cultural importance of food.\u00a0I\u2019d lived it.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: I can relate to those feelings of disjuncture. Moving from living in small, face-to-face villages in the West African rain forest to metropolitan New York was wildly jarring for Philip and me, as well.<\/p>\n And, for you, the Peace Corps would have asserted its own intense realities. Had you always planned to pursue graduate training in anthropology after your Peace Corps stint?<\/p>\n RV<\/strong>: I applied for a number of jobs and eventually was offered a position with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, teaching primary school on the Navajo reservation.\u00a0I was accepted into grad school at U VA at the same time.\u00a0My decision for grad school was based on cross-cultural experiences I had not understood in Venezuela, and my sense that I could choose to attempt an understanding . . . or put on a blindfold and walk the same path again.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: How fascinating. Yet you opted for archaeology rather than cultural anthropology. I\u2019m guessing that was because you\u2019d majored in history as an undergrad. Archaeology and history are certainly first cousins. And you found your way back to history when you started archivally researching pre-Civil War racial lives in Virginia.<\/p>\n RV<\/strong>: In this, Reginald Butler was a great teacher.\u00a0He totally reoriented my understanding of registrations, or \u201cfree papers,\u201d from mere descriptions of height, sex, age, and physical features such as scars, hair and skin color, to a cultural context.\u00a0He saw them as part of a police rap sheet, such as this one<\/a> from New York. I think these insights are what we are all looking for when we try to translate from one cultural context to another.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: You\u2019ve written that Reginald, himself, read anthropology while in his history graduate program. It sounds like he offered you a model of how to bring anthropological questions to the past. That\u2019s certainly what you did in your own research, as you painstakingly pieced together families\u2019 lives from scattered records.<\/p>\n But, how did you become involved in the project to publish an expanded version of Reginald\u2019s unpublished dissertation?<\/p>\n RV<\/strong>: Reginald\u2019s MAC hard drive crashed around 2001 or 2002, and he lost his only digital copy of the manuscript.\u00a0He asked me if I could OCR a paper copy he gave me.\u00a0That took a few years.\u00a0A lot was happening at home and work, and the OCR\u2019d document came out a mess. I had to correct ones and \u201cI\u201ds, zeroes and \u201cO\u201ds, set a constant font, and turn all the footnotes at the page bottoms into real footnotes. It was tedious!\u00a0 <\/p>\n [AG:<\/strong> OCR = Optical Character Recognition. This is a technically demanding means of recovering lost data from a computer. Bob\u2019s amazing computer skills were clearly up to the task.]<\/p>\n Reginald\u2019s Parkinson\u2019s was worse by that time, 2005, and he was retiring.\u00a0 Also, somewhere along the line, he had given me a fat folder of his notes on manuscripts and digital files, with spreadsheets he\u2019d created and miscellaneous personal notes. After more than 20 years I \u201crediscovered\u201d these while writing the last pages of my essay.\u00a0I didn\u2019t even remember having them.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: Any thoughts on why Reginald left you all his scholarly files?<\/p>\n RV<\/strong>: I am not sure I know how to express this adequately, but this was, or became, a huge duty of trust.\u00a0I do not know the source of his confidence in me.\u00a0At that point, we\u2019d known each other for perhaps six or seven years.\u00a0We\u2019d had serious, very personal, conversations about race.\u00a0I have no idea what he saw in me or where his trust came from, but I felt I had to honor it.<\/p>\n After the gathering on the family property in Goochland County following Reginald\u2019s passing, I approached Peter Onuf and told him I had a digital copy of the book manuscript. I emailed it to him, and he said he would have people review it.\u00a0That started the process.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: What a beautiful story of a professional partnership, both in life and beyond.<\/p>\n Most scholars leave behind a lot of unpublished data that will never be available to colleagues or students. It is rare for others to wade into those deep waters and find ways to identify, re-shape, and publish the hidden gems among notes and manuscripts. I think of Paul Riesman\u2019s magnificent ethnography, First Find Your Child a Good Mother: The Construction of Self in Two African Communities<\/a><\/em>, which Rutgers University Press published four years after his untimely death<\/a> at 50, with <\/p>\n input by his widow and former colleagues and students. You and your colleagues have done something similar for Reginald Butler\u2019s work and have thereby assured him a scholarly legacy.<\/p>\n Beyond your chapter in the volume, did you have other input into how the revised dissertation took shape as a book?<\/p>\n RV: When Reginald became director of the Carter Woodson Institute (a year after the previous director, Armstead Robinson, died suddenly), I believe his administrative duties consumed him, and, as much as he loved it, there was no time for the book.\u00a0It was a double whammy: his hard disk ground down to aluminum powder, and the job ground him down.\u00a0From my perspective, it was a sad and revealing display of the academic treadmill.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n I carefully read both his dissertation and the revised manuscript many times.\u00a0I imagine one thing he dreaded was running down all the citations.\u00a0I built a spreadsheet with a URL for each citation, making many corrections and additions. It was a horrendous grind.\u00a0If the citation had a problem, I had to compare the citation in the book to the one in the dissertation. I had to carefully rewrite sections where there were major errors of fact. It seems clear to me that the dissertation was written with pencil notes for citations and that he never had an opportunity to review and correct them.\u00a0When\/if there is a digital edition, I\u2019d like to see the URLs in the footnotes so that readers have instant access to the primary sources.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: This was such a labor of love.<\/p>\n In your essay, you wrote that you first met Reginald in 1995: \u201cI contacted him to enquire about [a] court order to take a \u2018census\u2019 of free people of color\u201d (p. 161). By 2001, you added: \u201cI had been gathering information on free people of color in Albemarle County for about six years and sharing my finds with Butler and his students, who came to my house to work on genealogies of Albemarle families of color from the records I had transcribed\u201d (p. 184).<\/p>\n So, while working as a computer specialist for the U.S. Army\u2019s National Ground Intelligence Center<\/a>, you were independently pursuing serious research about free Black Virginians. Among other exhaustive but impressive technical tasks, you detail that you photographed a large set of aerial photos and used a software platform (ArcGIS) to georegister them, digitize their property lines, and create a geodatabase, with the goal of producing an \u201cinteractive map of land ownership by race for Albemarle\u2019s Rivanna district\u201d (185). You then painstakingly intercalated such photos with property records, apprenticeship records, tax records, court records, and genealogies, creating tables and flowcharts to reconstruct family lives and understand the interwoven meshings of race and power. And, you\u2019ve generously made these resources freely available to all, online<\/a>. One must imagine that the motivation to pursue this independent research was personally meaningful, and that this was, essentially, a passion project. Any thoughts on where this passion comes from?<\/p>\n RV<\/strong>: How did I get into this?\u00a0 My mother said her father\u2019s grandmother had \u201cIndian\u201d ancestry.\u00a0I went to hear Helen Roundtree<\/a> talk about researching Native Americans in Virginia.\u00a0She said they were classified as \u201cpeople of color\u201d and registered as such.\u00a0Even though genetic testing later showed no Native inheritance for my mother, I started looking . . .<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: Searching for hidden nooks and crannies of our own identity can lead us down fascinating paths as scholars, too, right?<\/p>\n Toward the end of your essay, you remind us that what might appear to be trivial details can yield impactful information for a researcher who knows where to look, and what questions to ask. That\u2019s as true of archival research as it is of research in archaeology or cultural anthropology \u2014 or, really, any scholarly field. You write: \u201cdetails might be found in the archival weeds, but one person\u2019s weed is another\u2019s flower when it blossoms into an understanding of personal motivations underlying documentary records.\u201d Here, you are clearly giving more than a passing nod to the interpretive tools of cultural anthropology that you learned in our graduate program.<\/p>\n And, taking your pedagogical point further, I love how you end your essay, urging students to \u201clook beyond the confines of canonical texts in their discipline broaden the scope of their inquiries, and seek explanations that enhance their own understanding of the past\u201d (188).<\/p>\n That seems a good place to end our conversation!<\/p>\n BONUS<\/strong>: <\/p>\n On January 23, 2026, a day-long, hybrid-format symposium in honor of the life and work of Reginald D. Butler will take place in Charlottesville. Bob Vernon and the others involved in the production of Butler\u2019s landmark book will participate. It promises to be, at once, an enlightening and moving event. You can register for the in-person event here<\/a>; or register for a Zoom link here<\/a>.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n P.S. As we finished this conversation, we learned that Donald Trump had invaded Venezuela. Having lived in that country for two years, Bob would, I knew, have many insightful comments.<\/p>\n AG<\/strong>: Any quick thoughts?<\/p>\n RV<\/strong>: The snatching of Maduro is indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding of the political reality of Venezuelan politics.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Maduro was not so much the head of government as he was one leg of a\u00a0triumvirate that distributes booty derived from governing.\u00a0Maduro and siblings Delcy and Jorge Rodriguez represent the symbolic legacy of Hugo Ch\u00e1vez as heads of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela<\/a>. They maintain power and influence by distributing positions and benefits to loyal party followers.\u00a0Vladimir Padrino L\u00f3pez is the Minister of Defence and is responsible for military support of the government.\u00a0Diosdado Cabello Rond\u00f3n is the Minister of Interior and a hardline enforcer of state authority through an extensive patronage network that includes connections to colectivos<\/a>, the motorcycle gangs that terrorize citizens, and drug trafficking organizations.\u00a0He is, perhaps, the most dangerous man in Venezuela.\u00a0Political power is balanced between these three factions, any two of which can assure the loyalty of the third.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s understanding of the nature of political power in Venezuela should have been informed by a political anthropologist, or anyone else familiar with the history of triumvirates. The power wielded by Padrino L\u00f3pez and Cabello suggest that the removal of Maduro followed by threats to Delcy Rodriguez will be insufficient to \u201crun\u201d Venezuela. <\/p>\n I\u2019ve been in contact with a few friends in Venezuela. Even the most anti-Chavista question, and are affronted by, this intervention. What will these actions cost the two countries, and what terrible precedents do they set for international relations and the importance of honoring the Constitution that established our republic?<\/p>\n Imagine the capriciousness of a presidential kidnapping, with no serious thought of what follows.\u00a0And to that, add glib lies and egocentricity. \u201cDonroe Doctrine\u201d?? Really!<\/p>\n \t\t\t\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In this conversation, I catch up with Robert (\u201cBob\u201d) Vernon, a friend who\u2019s had a few lifetimes\u2019 worth of fascinating and non-linear careers both before and after our time together in grad school at the University of Virginia, back in the \u201970s. His latest scholarly venture takes him far from his more recent jobs, returning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7027049,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11767],"tags":[8785,30310,14607],"dealstore":[],"offerexpiration":[],"class_list":["post-7027048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anthropology","tag-race","tag-researching","tag-virginia"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/almagottlieb.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/Paper-Plane-Looped-Trajectory-2-300x210.png\")
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Related<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p>\n