Virginia

Virginia sits at the center of American history in a way no other state can quite claim. It was the site of the first permanent English settlement in North America at Jamestown in 1607, the home colony of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, and the state that supplied four of the first five presidents. It was also, for much of its history, the largest slaveholding state in the country — a contradiction that runs through Virginia's story from its colonial origins to the Civil War and beyond. When the Confederacy was formed in 1861, Richmond became its capital, placing Virginia at the physical and symbolic center of the conflict.

The Civil War was fought with exceptional intensity on Virginia's soil. Manassas, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg are among the dozens of major engagements that turned the state into a killing ground. Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865, sits in the Virginia piedmont — the place where the war ended. After Reconstruction, Virginia joined the rest of the South in enacting Jim Crow laws and disenfranchising Black voters, a system that persisted until the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

Modern Virginia has undergone a dramatic political transformation. Long a conservative Southern state, its shift toward the suburbs of Northern Virginia — swelled by federal workers, contractors, and a diverse professional class — turned it into a competitive swing state and, by the 2010s, reliably Democratic in presidential elections. It remains one of the most historically layered states in the country, its landscape dense with battlefields, colonial plantations, and the monuments of a history still being actively interpreted.