Browse Items (44 total)

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…

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…

Waterways provided the people of the Eastern Shore and Hampton Roads regions with access to food, supplies, and transport long before English colonists arrived in 1607. As English settlements displaced and removed Indigenous people from the land near…

From the time the earliest English settlers arrived in 1607 to today, corn has been a staple crop in Virginia. Farmers across the state grew vegetables like corn to eat and to feed their farm animals. As America's population increased, the demand for…

After John Rolfe's successful experimentation with the West Indies tobacco plant, Nicotaiana tabacum, the Virginia Company of London realized that it had found a profitable product to export from the colony. Tobacco cultivation spread widely through…

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…

During the 1760s, many Americans came to believe that the British government was imposing unfair taxes on goods coming into the colonies. Parliament levied its first direct tax on the colonists in 1764 to help pay for the costs of fighting the Seven…

Hiring out enslaved men, women, and children was a common business arrangement among Virginians prior to emancipation and the abolishment of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The practice of hiring out, which occurred in…

In December 1833, a group of about sixty Black and white men met in Philadelphia and organized the American Anti-Slavery Society to seek the immediate emancipation of enslaved people. The Society viewed slavery as a violation of the principle of…

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,…