Virginia is a state in the United States that is usually considered the northernmost southern state. The state capital is Richmond, while Virginia Beach is the largest city known for having the world’s longest sandy beach.
According to ebizdir, Virginia borders West Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia (on the other side of the Potomac River ) to the north, to the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, to North Carolina and Tennessee to the south, and to Kentucky and West Virginia to the west.
Elizabeth I of England gave the whole area the name Virginia, which came to apply to the entire coastal area from South Carolina to Maine.
Among public authorities that have their headquarters here are the CIA and the US Department of Defense. Many public funds are used in Northern Virginia, especially in the military industry. The Hampton Roads area is used extensively by e.g. The U.S. Navy as well as the U.S. Air Force and NASA, and it has the largest concentration of military bases and facilities in any urban area in the world.
TIMELINE:
1607 – Jamestown Colony is founded by the London Virginia Company. Three ships, Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery arrived in Jamestown on May 14 with 104 men and boys, who founded the first permanent English settlement in North America. Pocahontas, the daughter of Native American chief Powhatan, provided food for and spent much of his time in the colony. She served as ambassador, negotiator, mediator and interpreter between the two peoples. It is estimated that there were between 14-21,000 Powhatan Indians in the area at this time. The city was the capital of the Virginia colonyuntil 1698, when the State Assembly burned down and the capital was then moved to the city of Williamsburg, named after King William III.
1610-14 – The first of three wars between settlers from the Virginia colony and powhatan Indians takes place.
1622-26 – The second war between settlers from the Virginia colony and the Powhatan Indians broke out on May 22, 1622, wiping out a third of the colony in a violent massacre when the Indians made a surprise attack. Had it not been for some Christian Indians warning of the attack, the death toll would have been greater.
1637 – The city of Richmond is founded, but first gained status as a city in 1737.
1644-46 – The last war between the Virginia Colony and the Powhatan Indians ends when Opechancanough is captured and executed. He was the younger brother of Chief Powhatan.
1770 – Virginia is recognized as the first state to build a psychiatric hospital, known in modern times as Eastern State Hospital, established on June 4. The hospital burned to the ground on June 7, 1885, due to a fire that had started in the building’s newly established electrical network. In 1985, the hospital was rebuilt on top of the foundation and transformed into a museum.
1780 – During the American Revolutionary War, the capital was moved to Richmond by Governor Thomas Jefferson, who was nervous that Williamsburg’s location would make the city vulnerable to a British attack.
1781 – During the American Revolutionary War, the decisive naval battle takes place in the Chesapeake Bay. At the Battle of the Chesapeake, the French navy defeated the British navy.
From September 28 to October 17, 1781, the American-French force defeated the British in the Siege of Yorktown, leading to the end of the war and the independence of the colonies.
1788 – Virginia is admitted as the 10th state of the United States on June 25.
1789 – George Washington was America’s first president with John Adams as vice president. Under George Washington, 10 amendments were made to the Constitution, primarily on individual rights, but also on the rights of states. George Washington died on December 14, 1799. He is the only American president who has not lived in the White House in Washington DC, which was not completed until after his death. He lived as president first in New York, later in Philadelphia.
1801 – Thomas Jefferson was America’s third president. He was one of ” The Founding Fathers ” and one of the men behind the Declaration of Independence with the section ” that all human beings are created equal” and that they have been given certain inalienable rights by their Creator, including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He died on the same day as the 2nd President of the United States, John Adams (July 4, 1826).
1809 – James Madison was America’s fourth president. As president, Madison largely continued Jefferson’s political line. In 1812, however, he was forced to declare war on Britain – partly due to pressure from the hinterland. 3 years later, peace was made in Ghent without the Americans or the British achieving anything special. After his presidency, he retired to Virginia, but he still participated in the public debate until his death on June 28, 1836.
1817 – After serving as governor, senator, war minister, and ambassador to France, James Monroe becomes the fifth president of the United States. probably best known for the Monroe Doctrine, which he presented in his speech to Congress on December 2, 1823. In it, he proclaimed that America should be free from future European colonization and free from European interference in the affairs of sovereign states. At the same time, it expressed the United States’ intention to remain neutral in European wars and wars between European powers and their colonies, but to regard any new colony or intervention in independent American countries as hostile to the United States. Although it’s Monroes most famous contribution to society, it is worth noting that the speech was written by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. Monroe died there of heart failure and tuberculosis on July 4, 1831, becoming the third president to die on July 4.
1819 – The University of Virginia is founded in the city of Charlottesville by Thomas Jefferson, and is the only university in the United States that is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. It has played an important role in the American education system, as it was the first with educations in astronomy, philosophy and architecture. Since the 1840s, the university has relied on a so-called system of honor, where students promise not to lie, steal or cheat. In practice, this means that written examinations are held without supervision. Among the well-known alumni from the university are Edgar Allan Poe,Georgia O’Keeffe, Woodrow Wilson, Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy.
1831 – On August 21, African-American slave Nat Turner leads a slave revolt that results in 55 white deaths. The whites responded again, killing at least 200 blacks. Turner was sentenced to death and hanged on November 11th. Watch the reconstructed short documentary here.
1859 – John Brown is the first white American abolitionist to speak out to start a rebellion to abolish slavery in the United States. He has been called “the most controversial of all 19th century Americans.” His attempt to start a liberation movement among the slaves in Virginia shook the United States, although not a single slave followed his call. He was charged with treason against the state of Virginia and hanged on Dec. 2.
1861 – The first battle of Manassas in July, also known as the Battle of Bull Run, is the first major battle of the American Civil War. The second battle was fought between the 28-30. August 1862
1862 – The Battle of Williamsburg takes place on May 5, as part of the Peninsula Campaign of the American Civil War. It was the first real battle in the Peninsula campaign in which nearly 41,000 Union soldiers and 32,000 Confederates participated in a draw, which ended with the Confederates continuing their withdrawal.
1863 – The 48 counties to the northwest, which remain loyal to the Union, break away and form the state of Kanawha, which later becomes the state of West Virginia. More battles were fought on Virginia territory than anywhere else in the United States during the Civil War, and the city of Richmond served as the capital of the Confederate States of America. Virginia formally became a state in the United States again on January 26, 1870.
The Seven Days Battle was a series of 6 major battles fought from June 25 to July 1, 1862 near Richmond, Virginia.
1864 – Arlington National Cemetery is established on May 13 in the area of Arlington House, formerly home to General Robert E. Lee and his family. The cemetery is located on the other side of the Potomac River, seen from Washington DC, near the Pentagon.
1865 – The Battle of Appomattoc Court House is the last battle fought by General Robert E. Lee ‘s Army of Northern Virginia before surrendering to the Union Army under General Ulysses S. Grant.
1870 – The second floor of the Virginia State Capitol suddenly collapses in the middle of a hearing on April 27, when the balcony gave way to the preponderance of people and fell to the floor, which also gave way and fell over the House of Delegates, killing 62 and injured 251 people.
On September 28, 1870, a flood of James River caused a lot of deaths, 20 homes were washed away, and damage ran up to a million $ Read more here.
1902 – Maggie Lena Walker opens the first bank for African Americans, of which she was director.
1913 – Woodrow Wilson became America’s 28th president. In his first term as president, he persuaded Congress to implement sweeping reforms, among the most radical until the 1930s New Deal. In 1919, in the midst of a heated debate with his Republican opponents over the formation of the League of Nations, he suffered a stroke that paralyzed him. He was probably the most intellectual president of the United States, the only one with a PhD degree, he was also a Presbyterian Christian.
1917 – The Langley Research Center in Virginia, is the oldest NASA laboratory in the United States. Researcher in aerospace.
1935 – Shenandoah National Park is established on December 26. One of the main natural attractions in the park is the Blue Ridge Mountains, covered with deciduous forests, which are home to tens of thousands of animals. In the part of the mountain range that runs through Virginia, there are also a number of limestone formations with a large number of larger and smaller cave complexes, eg Luray Caverns, Grand Caverns, Endless Caverns, Shenandoah Caverns and others.
1943 – The foundation stone of the Pentagon building is laid on September 11, 1941. It was inaugurated on January 15, 1943 and is the world’s largest office building with about 26,000 employees.
1947 – Central Intelligence Agency, often abbreviated CIA, is the US foreign intelligence service. The CIA is headquartered on September 18, 1947 by President Harry S. Truman in Langley, Virginia, a few miles west of Washington DC near the Potomac River, giving the agency the unofficial saying “See you at Langley.”
1954 – Segregation is declared unconstitutional.
1964 – The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel opens on April 15. Since then, more than 100 million vehicles have crossed the world’s longest bridge tunnel.
1965 – Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and 22 other astronauts use the Lunar Landing Research Facility at the Langley Research Center to practice solving problems they would encounter 45 feet from the Moon’s surface.
1981 – The first test tube baby in the United States, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, is born in Norfolk. Read more here.
1993 – 18 tornadoes hit southern Virginia on August 6 in less than 4 hours, killing four people, injuring 259 and damaging $ 52.5 million. It was very unusual for these outbreaks to occur in the spring.
2001 – As part of the 9/11 attacks, a passenger plane, American Airlines Flight 77, hit the west wing of the Pentagon building, which was under renovation at the time, collapsing parts and killing 125 people in addition to the 64 occupants in the airplane.
2003 – From the 6-20. September, Hurricane Isabel ravaged Virginia, and floods left more than 1 million people without power. The extent of the damage was $ 1.85 billion, making it the state’s most expensive natural disaster.
2007 – The Virginia Tech massacre takes place on April 16 in the city of Blacksburg. The 23-year-old South Korean student, Cho Seung-Hui, shot and killed a total of 32 people from the university in two rounds, after which he committed suicide. That makes it the most massacre school massacre ever in the United States. See a website made in honor of the victims here.
2009 – Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy succumbs to cancer on August 25 at his home in Hyannis Port, two weeks after his sister lost her life. He was buried at Arlington by the side of his brothers, John and Robert.
2011 -An earthquake in Virginia on August 23, damaged buildings in Washington DC. Read more here.
In December 2011, Virginia Tech again became the site of the shooting. A police officer was killed and the perpetrator shot himself 45 minutes later. Read the timeline for the shooting here.
