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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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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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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![Rind letter.jpg Rind letter.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Rind%20letter.jpg.webp?itok=EZH_y0Zb)
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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![TX705.F5.1750.Rare_frontispiece.jpg TX705.F5.1750.Rare_frontispiece.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/TX705.F5.1750.Rare_frontispiece.jpg.webp?itok=I6BVm633)
Food and dining were integral to social life in the eighteenth century, particularly among the upper class. The gentry...
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Colored Knights of Pythias Helmet (c. 1890)
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![Colored Knights of Pythias Helmet Colored Knights of Pythias Helmet.2013.67.A-B.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Colored%20Knights%20of%20Pythias%20Helmet.2013.67.A-B.jpg.webp?itok=QwseuFor)
Race has been a divisive issue throughout American history, and this impressive helmet tells part of the story.
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Connecticut sculpture
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Records of the Best Products Company provide interesting insights into the history of this iconic sculpture.
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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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Diaries
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![Mss5.1.W2848.1.1933.Aug20.jpg Mss5.1.W2848.1.1933.Aug20.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Mss5.1.W2848.1.1933.Aug20.jpg.webp?itok=CKxyx0B3)
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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Dugout Canoe
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![VHE_DugoutCanoe_Teaser.jpg VHE_DugoutCanoe_Teaser.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/VHE_DugoutCanoe_Teaser.jpg.webp?itok=yEgfSazE)
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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Duke Ellington at the Mosque
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![ML410.E44.D86.1968.Cover__0.jpg ML410.E44.D86.1968.Cover__0.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/ML410.E44.D86.1968.Cover__0.jpg.webp?itok=m1taoFgC)
Late in his career, jazz great Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (1899–1974) composed three "Sacred Concerts," longer...
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Ella Fitzgerald's False Eyelashes
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![Ella Fitzgerald's Eyelashes](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Ella%20Fitzgeralds%20Eyelashes_1997.82.3_v1.jpg.webp?itok=8WbRCt82)
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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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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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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From Horse-Driven to Gas-Fueled Transportation
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![From Horse-Driven to Gas-Fueled Photograph of the Progress Manufacturing Company](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/FromHorseDrivenToGasFueled_Gas%20Pump_1996.178_v1.jpeg.webp?itok=DosrvziL)
This gravity-flow pump (c. 1927), used near Petersburg, Virginia, is evidence of the state’s transition from horse...
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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...