The search results below contain listings from our website. To search our library and museum collections catalogs, please visit the Collections page.
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A Life Rediscovered: The Story of Emily Winfree
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Emily Winfree, an African American woman who lived through slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, never...
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Abolitionist Pitcher
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Learn about how this pitcher based on Uncle Tom's Cabin was used as propoganda in the mid-1800s.
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Arthur Ashe Jr.’s Family Tree: Tracing the Blackwell Family to 1735
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See a rare family tree, drawn by hand on canvas, tracing Arthur Ashe, Jr.’s family.
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Audubon's The Birds of America
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In the VMHC collections are several rare editions of his work, including a first edition of Viviparous Quadrupeds and...
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Audubon's Viviparous Quadrapeds
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Following the success of his Birds of America, John James Audubon began to gather material for an equally ambitious...
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Booker T. Washington
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Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was born enslaved on April 5, 1856, in Franklin County, Virginia. After emancipation...
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Bookplates
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The use of bookplates is almost as old as printing itself. They were used to record ownership and to reassure the owner...
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Broadsides
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Broadsides, or broadsheets, are items printed on one side of a sheet of paper and generally posted or distributed as...
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Christmas Cards
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Christmas cards are ephemeral, and this essence is the very reason they can be of interest to researchers. Scholars...
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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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Convict Leasing
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For much of the twentieth century, convicts worked on Virginia’s roads. This practice grew out of the convict lease...
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Double Take
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Daguerreotypes are the earliest form of permanent photographic imagery. They are made by capturing an image on a...
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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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Fore-edge Painting
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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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Indian Tribes of North America
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In the museum's rare book collection, a remarkable compilation of images exists in History of the Indian Tribes of North...
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Industrialization in Virginia
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The 1920 census revealed that, for the first time, more Americans were living in urban areas than rural ones. However...
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John Marshall Speculates on America’s Second Bank
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A question on the minds of politicians and voters in 1832 America was whether the Second Bank of the United States, the...
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Letterhead
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Correspondence between individuals plays an important role in our understanding not only of how people communicated in...
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Life Portrait of Pocahontas
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The only life portrait of Pocahontas (1595–1617) and the only credible image of her, was engraved by Simon Van de Passe...