Browse Items (28 total)

World War II fundamentally altered the workforce of the United States as the nation shifted from a peacetime consumer-focused economy to one centered on war production. While industries shifted their production lines to munitions and supplies for the…

Pocahontas was the daughter of Powhatan, the powerful paramount chief of the Algonquin Indians in eastern Virginia, which the Indigenous Virginians called Tsenacomoco. She was about eleven years old when the English colonists arrived in 1607.…

From late in the 19th century until the middle of the 1960s, Virginia's white authorities tried to keep Black citizens from full participation in government and society. The Virginia state constitution adopted in 1902 reinstituted a poll tax as a…

In January 1975, President Gerald Ford established the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year. The purpose of the commission was to work in conjunction with the International Women’s Year proposed by the United Nations in…

During World War II booklets were published to assist homemakers provide for their families and meet the requirements of the wartime ration system created after the U.S. entered the war in December 1941. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive…

During World War II, the United States Army established a unit that enabled women to fill non-combat roles. Prior to the creation of this unit women mostly served as nurses supporting combat troops. In May 1941, Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers of…

At the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention in 1919, President Carrie Chapman Catt proposed the creation of a “league of women voters to finish the fight and aid in the reconstruction of the nation.” Even before the ratification in…

World War I brought about great shifts in American society. As the nation was gripped by war, the entire population mobilized to produce weapons and supplies for the troops. One way in which they supported the war effort was through the purchasing of…