Browse Items (215 total)

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…

Women played many roles during the American Revolution, but only a few are known to have disguised themselved as men and participated in battle. The penalties for being discovered could be severe. Women who fought in the army tried hard to keep their…

As a young man Anthony Rosenstock (1833–1906) left his home in what is now Germany and sailed from Hamburg to New York City, arriving in November 1853. When he landed, he had three cents and a letter of introduction to a distant relation. He…

Early in the twentieth century, some Virginia women embraced the fight for equal voting rights and organized the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in 1909. Many women, however, opposed such efforts and a group in Richmond established the Virginia…

Antonio Sansone was born in 1856 in Termini Imerese, Sicily. He immigrated to the United States in 1880 at the start of a wave of Italian immigration to America that lasted until about 1920. By 1899, he had established Antonio Sansone & Company,…

Circulated in Staunton, Virginia, the broadside dates to sometime between 1900 and 1919. In it, the women of Staunton asked the men in their community to vote in favor of prohibition or the legal elimination of alcohol consumption and sale. The…

This application for a marriage license was used after Virginia's General Assembly passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924. On the form, individuals had to indicate that he or she was not "a habitual criminal, idiot, imbecile, hereditary epileptic or…

In March 1865, before the Civil War had ended, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (generally known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) to supervise matters related to freed people as well as to distribute land "abandoned" by…

Arthur Robert Ashe was one of the greatest tennis players in American history and a noted human rights activist. He was the first and to date is the only Black man to win the singles title in three Grand Slam tennis events--the U.S. Open (1968), the…

The American Revolution was not only fought along the eastern seabord between the Continental Army and patriot militia and the British troops and their loyalist militia allies. An equally fierce battle raged in the Appalachian mountains between the…