Browse Items (108 total)

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…

After a public notice appeared in a Richmond newspaper in October 1842 that a petition would be presented to the Virginia General Assembly to sell King William County property known as "Indian town lands," members of the Pamunkey tribe took action.…

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…