Browse Items (222 total)

During the secession crisis of 1860–1861, attitudes about leaving the United States varied widely throughout Virginia. While the majority of white men supported the secession referendum that was approved in a vote on May 23, 1861, many white…

By 1780, the Continental Army had been battling British forces for five years during the American Revolution. Although the Americans had secured some key victories in places as far-flung as New York and South Carolina, the British still held…

The Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) was a French aristocrat whose family fortune ranked him among the wealthiest in France, but he was also one of America’s best-known Revolutionary heroes. Gilbert de Motier de Lafayette inherited his title at the…

The Brafferton School was one of several colonial “Indian Schools” intended to Christianize and educate Indigenous men and boys in a western scholastic tradition. It was part of a larger effort by Europeans to westernize and Christianize the…

Relations between Virgina's Indigenous peoples and the colonists who wanted to settle on their land were often contentious and violent. Virginia's colonial government passed multiple laws in the 17th century to regulate the actions of settlers and…

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…

Emancipation at the end of the Civil War did not bestow citizenship or legal protections on formerly enslaved men and women. Concerned that the newly freed African Americans would not be treated equally in courts of law, Congress passed a Civil…

After the Civil War, Black Virginians faced both opportunities and challenges. State law segregated public schools. As a result, a class of Black educators emerged to become leaders not only of their schools, but also of their communities whose…

In the second half of the twentieth century, many U.S. cities undertook a series of “urban redevelopment” projects with federal funds that leaders claimed would modernize and upgrade their cities’ infrastructure. These urban renewal projects often…

In March 1865, before the Civil War had ended, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (generally known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) to supervise matters related to freed people as well as to distribute land "abandoned" by…