Browse Items (107 total)

James Madison (1751–1836) was one of the most influential and successful Virginians of the Revolutionary generation. His service in the House of Delegates and in the Continental Congress taught him the pragmatic political practices he drew on to help…

The struggle for the ratification of the United States Constitution convinced some political leaders that amendments were needed to protect individual liberties from the strengthened national government created by the Constitution. During the First…

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…

On the morning of September 11, 2001 four flights were hijacked by members of the Islamic extremist group, al- Qaeda, in coordinated attack against the United States. All four hijacked planes were scheduled to be cross-country flights from the East…

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a major event of the Cold War that took place during John F. Kennedy’s presidency. In October 1962, a United States spy plane captured evidence of the Soviet Union (present day Russia) moving nuclear weapons into Cuba…

The Racial Integrity Act was introduced in 1924 in the General Assembly as Senate Bill No. 219, then as House Bill No. 311. When the act was passed, it prohibited interracial marriage and defined a white person as someone "who has no trace whatsoever…

In 1924, the federal government began looking for land in the southern Appalachian Mountains to create a large national park which would be easily accessible by individuals living in the eastern United States. The park opened in 1936 and was…

The Skyline Drive was created and designed to be a scenic driving road as part of Shenandoah National Park. The Shenandoah National Park was created in 1926 to preserve the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains for recreational use and for future…

Marriage licenses such as this one began to appear after Racial Integrity Act was introduced in 1924. The application for marriage shows how an individual had to indicate that he or she was not "a habitual criminal, idiot, imbecile, hereditary…

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was born at Shadwell, along the Rivanna River in what is now Albemarle County. At age fourteen, when his father died, Jefferson inherited more than 5,000 acres of land, about twenty enslaved laborers, and his father's…