The first time I set foot in Richmond, Virginia, I was an aspiring writer working on a (terrible) novel about a family torn apart by differing loyalties during the Civil War. Newly married, living in Charlottesville, Virginia, I was fascinated by the amount of resources the state of Virginia provided about the war, its background, and the lives of the people who fought in it. I was in Richmond to visit the American Civil War Museum at Historic Tredegar and the White House of the Confederacy. As a born and raised New Yorker, I had little understanding of the complexities of the war and the tumultuous years that led up to it. I expected to spend the entire day in the museum, head buried in displays and paragraphs of text I could eventually transfer to the backdrop of my book. Instead, it was Richmond that fascinated me: its picturesque blocks …