This week on the Lectures and History podcast, a discussion about West Virginia

statehood.

West Virginia University professor, William Gorby, describes the formation of West Virginia,

its entry into the union, and the effect it had during the Civil War.

All right.

Welcome back, everybody.

We are obviously at that point in the semester

when we're looking at West Virginia statehood,

the creation of the state that we're currently in.

We can finally, after this point, stop talking about

Western Virginia and Eastern Virginia.

We've been sort of looking at in the last week or so,

looking at sort of the divides between Eastern Virginia and Western Virginia.

We've talked about some of the political differences,

the grievances that Westerners have about the lack of funding for internal improvements,

roads and highways. We've obviously talked about the lack of funding for internal improvements, roads and highways.

We've obviously talked about the very complex role of slavery in the region as well.

And we left off last time looking at the Virginia Secession Convention when delegates decided to pull Virginia out of the Union in April of 1861.

Shortly thereafter that, delegates go back to their home counties.

We sort of talked about this last time, and they're trying to get support for a statewide referendum on secession.

So even though the Richmond Secession Convention has

voted to take Virginia out of the union, the vote gets to go to the people in late May of 1861.

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