Browse Items (217 total)

Silk has been produced and sold as a consumer good for thousands of years. Silk production originated in China and the earliest known examples date to 3000 B.C.E. For centuries, the trade routes known as the Silk Road stretched between East Asia and…

Black men gained the right to vote when the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified in 1870. Later in the 19th century, white men in Virginia passed laws requiring the payment of poll taxes. A new state constitution in 1902…

Radio waves were harnessed to send the first transatlantic wireless transmission in 1901, revolutionizing communication throughout the world. Some entrepreneurs saw a future for widely transmitting voice and music over radio, and by the 1910s…

The Richmond Planet was first published in 1882, seventeen years after the end of the Civil War. The thirteen founders (including James H. Hayes, James H. Johnston, E.R. Carter, Walter Fitzhugh, Henry Hucles, Albert V. Norrell, Benjamin A. Graves,…

As women participated in the movement to abolish slavery during the first half of the 19th century, some of them also began to advocate for women's rights. In July 1848, a group of women and men held a convention in Seneca Falls, New York. They…

Illustrated periodicals like Harper's Weekly were popular with Americans in the middle of the 19th century. After southern states formed the Confederate States of America, residents there could not easily receive newspapers and magazines printed in…

The temperance movement, or the movement to make alcohol consumption illegal, became widespread in nineteenth-century America. Since the European settlement of North America, alcohol consumption had been common. By the 1830s, Americans consumed an…