Browse Items (222 total)

Located in the Accomack County court records from 1758 is this advertisement for a fugitive enslaved person named Will. Prominent Richmond County planter Landon Carter placed the ad. Carter enslaved hundreds of adults and children on his plantation.…

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…

Indigenous Virginians and the English colonists conceived landownership in different ways. Tribal members did not "own" land individually, but lived in small communities and hunted, planted, and gathered food or other materials in the larger…

Tobacco production has dominated Virginia commerce for more than four centuries. From the colonial period, producers created brands that made their products distinguishable from others. Early tobacco art usually took the form of the planters' brand…

Danville does not commonly appear in the general narrative of civil rights protests and police brutality, but the city was the site of the most aggressive reaction to a peaceful civil rights protest in Virginia. In the 1960s, Danville was a small…

Arthur Robert Ashe was one of the greatest tennis players in American history and a noted human rights activist. He was the first and to date is the only Black man to win the singles title in three Grand Slam tennis events--the U.S. Open (1968), the…

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…

The United States produced many posters exhorting people to join the armed forces during World War II, as the need for soldiers, sailors, and pilots was critical. Often, the Office of War Information designed and circulated these posters, which were…

Radio waves were harnessed to send the first transatlantic wireless transmission in 1901, revolutionizing communication throughout the world. Some entrepreneurs saw a future for widely transmitting voice and music over radio, and by the 1910s…