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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Advice and Etiquette Books
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Studying etiquette books offers researchers a glimpse of how people interacted and how they adapted to their changing...
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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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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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Care Beyond National and Color Lines: Filipino Nurses in Virginia Across the 20th Century
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As of Winter 2021, Virginia remains among the top ten states for largest Filipino American populations, and by no...
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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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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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College Football
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Learn more about Virginians' long-standing love affair with football.
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Colored Knights of Pythias Helmet (c. 1890)
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Race has been a divisive issue throughout American history, and this impressive helmet tells part of the story.
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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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Education in Virginia
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The Virginia Constitution of 1869, passed during Reconstruction, established a statewide system of free public schools...
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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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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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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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James Jones Archive (1870s-1960s)
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With a coat of faded red paint and a crude hand-forged hasp to secure its lid, the simple pine chest – once used to...