Virginia Museum of History & Culture
Statewide galleries connect Indigenous homelands, colonization, slavery, revolution, migration, industry, civil rights, politics, and contemporary community life.
Artwork inspired by Leslie Garland Bolling
The museum presents Virginia history as a contested record rather than a single inherited story. Across objects, maps, photographs, business papers, campaign materials, and oral testimony, visitors can examine how Indigenous homelands, colonization, slavery, migration, industry, civil rights, and politics were experienced differently—and how unequal power shaped what entered the archive.
Use The Story of Virginia to establish the long chronology, then follow one question through several periods: who controlled land, whose labor produced wealth, how citizenship changed, or how later generations remembered conflict. This selective approach makes contradictions easier to recognize, especially when celebratory objects sit beside evidence of exclusion or lived harm, and leaves attention for a focused or community-curated exhibition.
- Scope
- 16,000 years to present
- Archive
- Millions of manuscripts and objects
- Allow
- 2–4 hours
Quick guide
- Anchor
- The Story of Virginia
- Trace
- One theme across periods
Make the visit count
- Question the source
- Identify who created each document and whose interests it served.
- Track changing borders
- Virginia’s political geography repeatedly changed the people counted inside it.
- Compare memory
- Notice how monuments, souvenirs, and later interpretation recast the same event.
- Leave time upstairs
- Temporary exhibitions often provide the sharpest revision of familiar narratives.
Good to know
The museum sits beside VMFA but deserves its own visit. Research-library access, public galleries, and special programs follow different procedures, so contact staff before arriving for archival work.
Notice these
- The Story of Virginia
- Research library
- Community history exhibitions