Browse Items (38 total)

By 1775 more than half a million Black Americans, most of them enslaved, were living in the thirteen colonies. Thousands participated in the American Revolution. They often gave their loyalty to the side which offered the best path to freedom from…

By 1780, the Continental Army had been battling British forces for five years during the American Revolution. Although the Americans had secured some key victories in places as far-flung as New York and South Carolina, the British still held…

By 1775, approximately half a million enslaved Americans were living in the thirteen colonies. Thousands of Black Americans participated in the American Revolution. Some joined the British while others fought with the Americans, depending on whom…

Petitions to the General Assembly were the primary catalyst for legislation in the Commonwealth from 1776 until 1865. Public improvements, military claims, divorce, freeing of enslaved people, incorporation of towns, and religious freedom were just…

The Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) was a French aristocrat whose family fortune ranked him among the wealthiest in France, but he was also one of America’s best-known Revolutionary heroes. Gilbert de Motier de Lafayette inherited his title at the…

Abraham Skipwith was the first Black man documented as a property owner in Richmond’s historic Jackson Ward district. Skipwith became a wealthy landowner after emancipating himself in the years following the American Revolution. His story illustrates…

When the first English settlers arrived in 1607, the Church of England served as the official church of the Virginia Colony. Under the 1689 English Act of Toleration, Protestants who were not members of the Church of England were still required to…

James Lafeyette was born enslaved about 1748. He lived on a plantation owned by William Armistead in New Kent County. Although he is sometimes identified as James Armistead, he never signed his name or self-identified as having the surname Armistead.…

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention approved a new constitution for the United States on September 17, 1787. But before it could be adopted, nine states had to ratify the document. It had the support of some of America's brightest statesman…

George Washington was born in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, to a relatively prosperous family. His father died when he was eleven and so he was not sent to school in England like his older half-brothers, but studied with tutors. He trained…