Browse Items (28 total)

This document is the first page of a treatise that was first issued by King James I (1566–1625) in 1604 and later received a new printing in 1674. He was the King of Great Britain from 1603 until his death in 1625. The first English ruler from the…

This photograph depicts a marble statue of George Washington, our nation’s first President. The statue was created by Jean-Antoine Houdon and is located in the Virginia State Capitol. Washington was born in 1732 in Westmoreland County, Virginia to a…

This document shows an article that was originally published in Life Magazine on March 18, 1966, written on the Lovings following the Virginia Supreme Court decision to uphold the 1924 Act to Preserve Racial Integrity Act. The case surrounds the…

CONTENT WARNING: Materials in the Library of Virginia's collections contain historical terms, phrases, and images that are offensive to modern readers. These include demeaning and dehumanizing references to race, ethinicity, and nationality; enslaved…

Along with the abolition of slavery, women's rights were also a topic for reformers. The woman suffrage movement began in 1848 at the first woman's rights convention, which was held in Seneca Falls, New York, with the participants calling for…

This broadside was circulated in Staunton, Virginia, 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 women…

For a significant portion of American history, women were not allowed to vote. Although they were considered citizens with rights equal to men, voting was considered a privilege and not a right and thus not extended to women. In the 1910s, women…

Richmond native Lila Meade Valentine was born in 1865 and devoted much of her life to advocating education and health-care reform and woman suffrage. In 1909, Valentine cofounded the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia (ESL) and was elected the…

The Equal Suffrage League of Virginia (ESL) was founded in 1909 in Richmond. The ESL became one of the most influential suffrage organizations in the country. Among the twenty founding women, Lila Meade Valentine, a Richmond native, was elected the…

Although the U.S. Constitution stated that all men were created equal, it left out the rights of women who, therefore, did not have the right to vote and partiicpate in the development of laws. In 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, women declared that…