Browse Items (110 total)

In March 1775, the American colonies appeared to be on a path to war with Britain. Tensions increased over British treatment of Bostonians after Parliament passed the Coercive Acts (also known as the Intolerable Acts) in 1774. In Virginia, Governor…

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) was the most prolific writer of pro-independence tracts during the Revolutionary War. He wrote for average Americans, so his works—notably Common Sense and The American Crisis—reached thousands of readers and convinced many…

Virginia has had three capitals since the English settlers first organized the colony's government. The first capital was located at Jamestown until 1699, when the House of Burgesses passed a resolution moving it to Williamsburg. In 1779, the General…

The last of Virginia's Revolutionary Conventions met from early May through July 5, 1776, to establish a new government for the independent Commonwealth of Virginia. In this session, the delegates unanimously passed the Virginia Declaration of Rights…

The Revolutionary War erupted with battles at Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill in 1775, but throughout the following year many colonists continued to believe reconciliation with Great Britain was possible. Some members of the Continental…

The Sons of Liberty threw hundreds of tea chests into Boston harbor in December 1773 to protest the passage of the Townshend Acts, which taxed a number of goods, including tea. The next year, Parliament responded to this destruction of about $1.7…

After the Civil War and the enfranchisement of Black men, political contests in Virginia were often heated. In 1879, a biracial coalition known as the Readjuster Party won control of the General Assembly and two years later won the governor’s race,…

Even before the end of the Civil War, newly freed Black people called on the government to grant them equal suffrage (the right to vote). A committee of Black residents in Norfolk made this demand in June 1865, shortly after the war ended. Norfolk’s…

In the decades after World War II, many towns and cities across the United States considered plans to redevelop aging neighborhoods. Many of these neighborhoods suffered from substandard housing, including public housing that had been erected during…

In 1896 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation did not violate the "equal protection of the laws" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Virginia and other southern states employed the doctrine of "separate…