Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jamestown, established in 1607, was the first permanent English settlement in the New World. The colony was financed by the Virginia Company of London under a charter issued by King James I in 1606, and Christopher Newport led the expedition that founded it.
Laws passed in Jamestown defined slavery as race-based in 1661, as inherited through the mother in 1662, and as enforceable by death in 1669. Earlier legal cases involving John Punch in 1640 and John Casor in 1655 had already established the basis for lifelong enslavement.
Representatives from 27 northwestern counties refused to accept Virginia's secession vote in 1861, in part because armed pro-Confederate groups prevented votes from being cast in areas opposing secession. These counties organized the Wheeling Convention, a Union-loyal government, which led to West Virginia becoming a separate state in 1863.
Barbara Rose Johns was a high-school student in Prince Edward County who started a strike in 1951 at her underfunded, segregated school. The lawsuit that followed, filed by attorneys Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, joined Brown v. Board of Education at the Supreme Court, which rejected the doctrine of "separate but equal" in 1954.
Northern Virginia is home to more than one-third of Virginia's total population and is the world's largest data center market, with over 47.7 million square feet of capacity as of 2016. Loudoun County holds the highest median household income in the entire nation, and the region hosts major federal agencies including the CIA in Langley and the Pentagon in Arlington.
The Virginia General Assembly is the state's bicameral legislature, made up of a 100-member House of Delegates and a 40-member Senate. It first convened in July 1619, making it the oldest continuously operating lawmaking body in North America, predating even the founding of most other American colonies.