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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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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Confederate Imprints
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![CI.4066.003.jpg CI.4066.003.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/CI.4066.003.jpg.webp?itok=6qzZYucL)
Before secession, most of the established publishers of booking, broadsides, and sheet music were located in such large...
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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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Craddock-Terry Records Walk on Over to the Museum
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![craddock terry report.jpg craddock terry report.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/craddock%20terry%20report.jpg.webp?itok=0f4SYuFM)
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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![AE25.E53.Rare_.OS_.vol22.pl1_.Anatomie.jpg AE25.E53.Rare_.OS_.vol22.pl1_.Anatomie.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/AE25.E53.Rare_.OS_.vol22.pl1_.Anatomie.jpg.webp?itok=t1zhWSPF)
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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![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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Education in Virginia
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![VHE_Education_PossumHollowSchoolhouse.2001.230.308.jpg VHE_Education_PossumHollowSchoolhouse.2001.230.308.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/VHE_Education_PossumHollowSchoolhouse.2001.230.308.jpg.webp?itok=DO8SpKJr)
The Virginia Constitution of 1869, passed during Reconstruction, established a statewide system of free public schools...
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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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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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![VHE_Freedmen_Harpers Weekley cropped.jpg VHE_Freedmen_Harpers Weekley cropped.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/VHE_Freedmen_Harpers%20Weekley%20cropped.jpg.webp?itok=TmJCMsl0)
In the antebellum South, African Americans were generally prevented from receiving education. After Appomattox...
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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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George Washington, Land Surveyor
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![Survey for Richard Barnes for a tract of 400 acres in Culpeper County, George Washington, 1749 Survey for Richard Barnes for a tract of 400 acres in Culpeper County, George Washington, 1749](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Mss1.St824a1.GWPlat.jpg.webp?itok=PRfdFkGi)
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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House Tour
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Learn more about Great Hall, Sulgrave Bedroom, Withdrawing Room, Dining Room, and Library at the historic Tudor-style...
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Indian Tribes of North America
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![E77.M13.RareFolio.Keokuk.jpg E77.M13.RareFolio.Keokuk.jpg](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/E77.M13.RareFolio.Keokuk.jpg.webp?itok=0Y7v4Q5k)
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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Jefferson’s Desk
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![Jefferson's Writing Desk A rectangular wooden desk, with writing surface propped at an angle and drawer opened](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/Desk.1956.1_Open_SLIDE.jpg.webp?itok=TN1yHIPN)
There are many reproductions of the desk on which Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Some have even...
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John Marshall Speculates on America’s Second Bank
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![John Marshall letters Two sepia toned handwritten letter pages](/sites/default/files/styles/fp_landscape_768x576/public/John%20Marshall%20letter%20to%20son%20about%20bank.JPG.webp?itok=mi5rOD9Q)
A question on the minds of politicians and voters in 1832 America was whether the Second Bank of the United States, the...