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Children's Manuscripts
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Prominent Virginians are well represented in the many manuscripts housed at the VMHC. However, documents by individuals...
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Clarise Sears Ramsey
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Charlotte Clarise Sears Risley Harrold Ramsey (1867–1922), whose parents were Joseph Henry Risley and Mary Elizabeth...
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Clementina Rind
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Clementina Rind was Virginia’s first female printer and newspaper publisher, publishing important official documents for...
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Colonial Cookbooks
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Food and dining were integral to social life in the eighteenth century, particularly among the upper class. The gentry...
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Confederate Imprints
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Before secession, most of the established publishers of booking, broadsides, and sheet music were located in such large...
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Confederate Love Poems
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The most prominent Civil War poetry is poetry of the battlefield.
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Diaries
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Do you remember the first time you swam in the ocean? What about the first movie you watched? Moments like those and...
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Diary of William Gwathmey, 1859
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On October 16, 1859, John Brown led eighteen followers in a raid on the federal arsenal and armory at Harpers Ferry...
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Dolley Madison
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Dolley (Payne) Todd Madison (1768–1849) lived through three wars, knew eleven presidents, and was a gracious and...
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Elizabeth I
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Elizabeth I (1533–1603), queen of England, never married and was known as the virgin queen. The first English attempts...
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Elizabeth Keckley
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Born a slave in Dinwiddie County, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1818–1907) purchased her freedom in 1855 and supported...
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Ella Fitzgerald's False Eyelashes
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Legendary singer and Virginia native Ella Fitzgerald, dubbed “The First Lady of Song,” exhilarated audiences with her...
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Ellen Glasgow’s Broken Heart
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Valentine’s Day cards and the celebrations around the holiday began to escalate during the early twentieth century.
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Equal Suffrage League of Virginia
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Learn about how the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia helped women gain the right to vote.
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For the Love of Beauty: The Collections of Lora and Claiborne Robins
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Explore nineteenth-century Hudson River School landscape paintings and colonial furniture collected by philanthropists...
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Fore-edge Painting
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![The poems of Winthrop Mackworth Praed / with a memoir by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge. Pages ruffled farther apart show a painted landscape and city](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Foreedge%20Painting_Rare%20Books%20ND%202370%20.P8_v1_DSC3145_0.jpg.webp?itok=ARBwm3xq)
Rarely are books prized as objects of art; often the content of the text, or the plates accompanying the text, are...
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Freedmen's Schools
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In the antebellum South, African Americans were generally prevented from receiving education. After Appomattox...
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Glee Clubs
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The VMHC has several glee club items in its collection. The earliest item, an 1848 broadside entitled “Rally Whigs”...
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Grace Sherwood: The "Witch of Pungo"
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On July 10, 1706, a forty-six-year-old Princess Anne County woman named Grace Sherwood faced an unusual legal procedure...
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House Tour
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Learn more about Great Hall, Sulgrave Bedroom, Withdrawing Room, Dining Room, and Library at the historic Tudor-style...