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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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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Craddock-Terry Records Walk on Over to the Museum
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The Craddock-Terry Shoe Company, once the largest employer in Lynchburg, produced lines of boots and shoes which were...
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Diderot's Encyclopédie
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Housed within the library collections of the museum is a complete thirty-five volume set of Diderot's Encyclopédie.
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Dugout Canoe
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The dugout canoe was an Indian concept but one so well suited to the Virginia rivers that Europeans and Africans also...
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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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Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity poster
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The Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity promoted understanding among groups during the tensions of the civil...
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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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Fraud! Controversy! And neat properties in Virginia: Things you never knew about title insurance
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Did you know that title insurance is almost exclusively an American business? In most industrialized countries...
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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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Freedom Riders
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In 1961, a small group of white and black volunteers rode public buses into the South to demonstrate that interstate...
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From Horse-Driven to Gas-Fueled Transportation
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This gravity-flow pump (c. 1927), used near Petersburg, Virginia, is evidence of the state’s transition from horse...
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George Washington, Land Surveyor
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George Washington’s surveying work spanned fifty years and enabled him to acquire vast tracts of land.
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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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Henkel Press
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In 1806, two young men, Ambrose Henkel and his brother Solomon, started one of the first German language presses in the...
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How Did Civilians Suffer?
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White women and children were left to fend for themselves, and many became widows and orphans when one in five...
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How Did Enslaved People Support the Confederacy?
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Enslaved and free black people provided even more labor than usual for Virginia farms when 89 percent of eligible white...
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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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Jacob L. "JL" Morewitz
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Jacob L. “JL” Morewitz was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1896 but raised in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1916, at the age of...
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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...