Browse Items (19 total)

Indigenous Virginians and the English colonists conceived landownership in different ways. Tribal members did not "own" land individually, but lived in small communities and hunted, planted, and gathered food or other materials in the larger…

Touted as the largest and most magnificent exposition of all time, the New York World’s Fair opened at Flushing Meadows in April 1939. In the Court of States, one exhibition was strikingly different from the rest: the Virginia Room, “an island of…

Alexander Spotswood served from 1710 to 1722 as lieutenant governor of Virginia, in the place of the royal governor who never came to the colony. During his tenure Spotswood sought to improve the colony's security and economy and relations with…

Black Hawk, born in 1767 and known in his native language as Makataimeshekiakiak, was a Sauk warrior and tribal leader. The Sauk lived on the Rock River, a tributary of the Mississippi, in what is now Illinois, and fought against the United States…

William Berkeley (1605–1677) was the longest-serving royal governor of Virginia. He served as a Crown governor (an appointee of the King) between 1642 until 1652 and again from 1660 until his death in 1677. In his late twenties, Berkeley was a part…

Thomas West (1576–1618), the twelfth Baron De La Warr, was appointed by King James I in 1606 to be part of the royal council that oversaw the Virginia Company of London. He monitored the situation in the Virginia colony from England and may have…

Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1552–1618) was an English explorer, soldier, writer, and a favorite at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, who granted him a charter to explore North America. Although he sponsored the attempts in the 1580s to colonize Roanoke…

In 1924, Virginia's General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act, which was designed to stop the “intermixture” of white and Black people. The act banned interracial marriage by requiring marriage applicants to identify their race as "white,"…

The annual payment of tribute by Virginia's Indians has been a long-standing practice that still occurs today. In 1646, Necotowance, "the King of the Indians" as the English referred to him, signed a treaty to end the third Anglo-Indian War. Annual…