Virginia

• 1. Indigenous Foundations And Colonial Origins

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  In 1607, the London Company established Jamestown as the first permanent English settlement in North America. This event marked a turning point for the Powhatan Confederacy, which controlled over 150 settlements with a population of around 15,000 people at that time. Chief Powhatan, known to history as Wahunsenacawh, led this alliance of thirty or so Algonquian-speaking tribes during the 1570s. The native population in the current boundaries of Virginia reached approximately 50,000 in the 1500s before European contact. Three-fourths of the native population died from smallpox and other Old World diseases during the seventeenth century. This devastation disrupted oral traditions and complicated research into earlier periods of their history. John Smith secured food for the colonists from nearby tribes while he served as president of the colony. After he left in 1609, trade stopped and ambush-style killings began between colonists and natives under Chief Powhatan and his brother. Mass starvation struck the colony that winter. By the end of the colony's first fourteen years, over eighty percent of the roughly eight thousand settlers transported there had died. Enslaved Africans were first sold in Virginia in 1619. Laws passed in Jamestown defined slavery as race-based in 1661 and inherited maternally in 1662.

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• 2. Revolutionary Leadership And Civil War Division

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  On the 15th of May 1776, the Convention declared Virginia's independence and adopted George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights. Thomas Jefferson drew upon Mason's work to draft the national Declaration of Independence later that year. The capital moved to Richmond in April 1780 at the urging of Governor Thomas Jefferson who feared Williamsburg's coastal location would make it vulnerable to British attack. British forces under Benedict Arnold took Portsmouth in December 1780 and raided Richmond the following month. General Charles Cornwallis and his superiors were indecisive about how to proceed with their seven thousand soldiers and twenty-five warships stationed in Virginia. Maneuvers by three thousand soldiers under Marquis de Lafayette and twenty-nine allied French warships confined the British to a swampy area of the Virginia Peninsula in September. Around sixteen thousand soldiers under George Washington and Comte de Rochambeau converged there and defeated Cornwallis in the siege of Yorktown. His surrender on the 19th of October 1781, led to peace negotiations in Paris and secured the independence of the colonies. During the American Civil War, the state government in Richmond joined the Confederacy while many northwestern counties remained loyal to the Union. The Virginia Secession Convention voted on April 17 to secede on condition it was approved in a referendum the next month. Representatives from 27 northwestern counties began the Wheeling Convention which organized a government loyal to the Union. This process led to the separation of West Virginia as a new state in 1863.

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• 3. Segregation Resistance And Modern Civil Rights

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  High-school student Barbara Rose Johns started a strike in 1951 at her underfunded and segregated school in Prince Edward County. The protests led Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill to file a lawsuit against the county that eventually joined Brown v. Board of Education at the Supreme Court. The court rejected the doctrine of separate but equal in 1954. Senator Harry F. Byrd and his Byrd Organization reacted with a strategy called massive resistance. The General Assembly passed a package of laws in 1956 that cut off funding to local schools that desegregated causing some to close. Courts ruled the strategy unconstitutional and on the 2nd of February 1959, Black students integrated schools in Arlington and Norfolk where they were known as the Norfolk 17. Rather than integrate, county leaders in Prince Edward shut their school system in June 1959. When litigation again reached the Supreme Court it ordered the county to reopen and integrate its schools which finally happened in September 1964. In 1967, the Supreme Court struck down the state's ban on interracial marriage with Loving v. Virginia. Governor Mills Godwin called a commission to rewrite the state constitution in 1968. The new constitution banned discrimination and removed articles that violated federal law passing in a referendum and going into effect in 1971. Douglas Wilder became the first African American elected as governor in the United States in 1989.

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• 4. Geographic Diversity From Mountains To Coast

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  The Chesapeake Bay separates the contiguous portion of the Commonwealth from the two-county peninsula of Virginia's Eastern Shore. Sea level rise has eroded land on islands including Tangier Island in the bay and Chincoteague one of 23 barrier islands on the Atlantic coast. The Tidewater is a coastal plain between the Atlantic coast and the fall line. It includes the Eastern Shore and major estuaries of Chesapeake Bay. The Piedmont is a series of sedimentary and igneous rock-based foothills east of the mountains known for heavy clay soil. The Blue Ridge Mountains are a physiographic province of the Appalachian Mountains with the highest points in the Commonwealth being Mount Rogers at 5,729 feet. The Ridge-and-Valley region west of the mountains includes Massanutten Mountain ridge and Great Appalachian Valley called Shenandoah Valley named after the river flowing through it. A meteor impact 35 million years ago created what is now eastern Virginia resulting in the Chesapeake Bay impact crater. This event may explain earthquakes and subsidence the region experiences today. The Commonwealth's carbonate rock contains more than 4,000 limestone caves ten of which open for tourism including popular Luray Caverns and Skyline Caverns.

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• 5. Federal Presence And Economic Transformation

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  Government agencies directly employ around 714,100 Virginians representing almost 17 percent of all employees in the state. Approximately 12 percent of all U.S. federal procurement money is spent in Virginia second only to California. In 2020, 125,648 active-duty personnel, 25,404 reservists, and 99,832 civilians worked directly for the Department of Defense at the Pentagon or one of 27 military bases covering over 1,000 square miles. Hampton Roads area home to world's largest navy base Naval Station Norfolk also serves as only NATO station on U.S. soil. Other large federal agencies in Northern Virginia include Central Intelligence Agency in Langley National Science Foundation and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria. Virginia has third highest concentration of technology workers among U.S. states with 451,268 tech jobs accounting for 11.1 percent of all jobs earning median salary of $98,292. Northern Virginia became world's largest data center market in 2016 with over 10 million square feet much located in Loudoun County branded Data Center Alley. Data centers handled around one-third of all internet traffic and directly employed 13,500 Virginians in 2023 supporting 45,000 total jobs.

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• 6. Demographic Shifts And Cultural Identity

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  The 2020 census found state resident population was 8,631,393 representing 7.9 percent increase since 2010 census. Another 23,149 Virginians live overseas giving state total population of 8,654,542 making it fourth-largest overseas population of U.S. states due to federal employees and military personnel. About twelve percent of residents were born outside United States with El Salvador most common foreign country of birth followed by India Mexico South Korea Philippines and Vietnam. State's most populous racial group non-Hispanic whites declined as proportion from 76 percent in 1990 to 58.6 percent in 2020. Largest minority group Blacks and African Americans represent about one-fifth of population. Commonwealth has highest number of Black-white interracial marriages in US with 8.2 percent describing themselves multiracial. Fairfax County is state's most religiously diverse jurisdiction hosting Ekoji Buddhist Temple Hindu Durga Temple and All Dulles Area Muslim Society considered country's second-largest Muslim mosque community. Over three million people 35 percent of Virginians live in twenty jurisdictions collectively defined Northern Virginia part larger Washington metropolitan area. Loudoun County fastest-growing county in state while Arlington smallest self-governing county by land area.

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