Amid consideration of the car tax phaseout and the ever-present issues of road and school construction, state lawmakers in Richmond are also trying to reckon with the lingering pain from a decision their predecessors made in 1924. In that year, the Virginia General Assembly legalized involuntary sterilization of citizens deemed "feebleminded." More than 7 thousand people were forced to undergo such operations. Paul Lombardo (UVa), director of the Program in Law and Medicine, traces the 50 year history of forced sterilization and examines the role several prominent Virginians played in the national push for eugenics.

Literature professor Geoffrey Morley-Mower (JMU) spent 31 years as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, serving in India, the Middle East, Gibraltar, Northern Ireland and Cyprus. Morley-Mower talks about his adventures in his book Flying Blind, where he describes flying as an "intoxicating and dangerous freedom to move through the blue air in three directions at once." When World War II broke out in Europe in September 1939, he was stationed in India where the British continued to live in splendor, waited upon by armies of servants, as if nothing had happened. Morley-Mower found himself flying biplanes of ancient vintage over the most exotic frontier in the world, keeping order among tribes that had not changed since the invasion of India by Mahmud of Ghazni in the Middle Ages.

As tobacco quickly loses its cash crop status in Virginia, some are suggesting that others of the state's native plants may rise to replace it. Ginseng, goldenseal and black cohosh are fetching high prices domestically and abroad because of their perceived medicinal qualities. Alternative agriculture specialist Andy Hankins (VSU) and forest products marketing expert Tom Hammett (VT) discuss the harvest of "sang" and other medicinal herbs. Also featured: "Alien Earthworms." Recent research by an earthworm ecologist suggests that we could tear up half the soil in North America and rarely find one that is of North American descent. Michael Lachance (VT) and Kelly Slocum, an expert on earthworm composting, discuss the evolutionary history of the creatures Aristotle dubbed "the intestines of the soil."