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 Beardless Boy of Seventeen Years
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Even before Aristophanes wrote of Lysistrata’s plan to end the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) by convincing the women...
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A House Built of Virginia Stone
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![A House Built of Virginia Stone Photograph of the Government Island Quarry](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/AHouseBuiltOfVirginiaStone_Government%20Island%20Quarry.jpeg.webp?itok=aheORpaA)
Approximately forty miles south of Washington, D.C., the Aquia sandstone quarry on Government Island sits quietly in the...
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A Post-WWII Mother's Day Card
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On June 25, 1944, from an Army Air Force base in Cerignola, Italy, 2d Lt. Harold Leazer penned a letter to his mother in...
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Arming the Commonwealth
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![Exhibits_ArmingTheCommonwealth_CartridgeBox.1990.100.367.jpg Exhibits_ArmingTheCommonwealth_CartridgeBox.1990.100.367.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Exhibits_ArmingTheCommonwealth_CartridgeBox.1990.100.367.jpg.webp?itok=mGWliVR3)
From providing protection from enemy combatants to finding dinner for a family, weapons have played a significant role...
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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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![QL715.A916.1845.RareFolio.Deer_.jpg QL715.A916.1845.RareFolio.Deer_.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/QL715.A916.1845.RareFolio.Deer_.jpg.webp?itok=TlOTK0Dk)
Following the success of his Birds of America, John James Audubon began to gather material for an equally ambitious...
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Bookplates
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![Bookplate.2012.1.5.jpg Bookplate.2012.1.5.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Bookplate.2012.1.5.jpg.webp?itok=W4-zqjnX)
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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Carving Out Space in the Military: WAVES
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![5 A. (G) Nancy Bailey Cogsdale.jpg 5 A. (G) Nancy Bailey Cogsdale.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/5%20A.%20%28G%29%20Nancy%20Bailey%20Cogsdale.jpg.webp?itok=LGC_1-TY)
World War II opened new opportunities for women in the military and on the home front, though it was not the first war...
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Céloron Plate
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![VHE_Celeron Plate_teaser.jpg VHE_Celeron Plate_teaser.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/VHE_Celeron%20Plate_teaser.jpg.webp?itok=jgJOsCVL)
One of the most important artifacts to survive from Virginia’s colonial period, this lead plaque was placed at the...
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Changing the Commonwealth with Crayons
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![Changing the Commonwealth with Crayons A photograph of Bellen Woodard and her More Than Peach Project.](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/ChangingTheCommonwealthWithCrayons_Crayons__DSC2231_cc_0.jpeg.webp?itok=GKtbS91p)
When she was in the third grade, a classmate asked her to pass the “skin-colored” crayon—a familiar request heard at her...
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Christmas in the Trenches
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Read excerpts from soldiers' letters home about their Christmas meals while stationed away from home.
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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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Clemenceau Givings Scrapbook (c. 1944)
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![Embroidered felt patch, "SPIT FIRE." Embroidered felt patch, "SPIT FIRE." Circular patch features a black, fire-breathing panther in the center embroidered on a yellow felt field. Blue emboidery is above and below the panther with "SPIT FIRE" embroidered in black on an orange embroidered field at the bottom.](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Clemenceau_Givings_%20Unit%20Patch_1992.251.1.34.A-I_G_v1.jpg.webp?itok=NE5RF1Z6)
In 1943, Clemenceau “Clem” Givings became the first Richmonder to earn his wings as a Tuskegee Airman, the popular name...
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Connecticut sculpture
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![VHE_Connecticut_Teaser.jpg VHE_Connecticut_Teaser.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/VHE_Connecticut_Teaser.jpg.webp?itok=Iy3-K8r8)
Records of the Best Products Company provide interesting insights into the history of this iconic sculpture.
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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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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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Flooded with Watercolors
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![Beverly Perdue - Coffee Break.jpg Beverly Perdue - Coffee Break.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Beverly%20Perdue%20-%20Coffee%20Break.jpg.webp?itok=66NaxQb0)
You can find many fine examples of watercolor paintings rendered on paper, manuscripts, maps, and miniatures in the...
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For the Love of Beauty: The Collections of Lora and Claiborne Robins
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![Block-Front Chest Block-Front Chest](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/VHE_Fortheloveofbeauty_robins_chest.jpg.webp?itok=kSnDQf6E)
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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Founding Frenemies: Hamilton and The Virginians
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![Founding Frenemies Note issued by the National Bank in 1793](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/FoundingFrenemies_P6_Hamilton_BankNote_CMYK.jpeg.webp?itok=zH3BK0Gb)
This exhibition examined how critically important relationships between Alexander Hamilton and three Virginians shaped...