Virginia

The eight towns in this collection reveal Virginia's complexity. Williamsburg was the colonial capital where Patrick Henry made his defiant speeches; Yorktown was where the war effectively ended. But teaching Virginia honestly also means confronting the contradiction at its core: the men who wrote most eloquently about liberty were themselves slaveholders, and the labor of enslaved people made their political careers possible. Lord Dunmore's Proclamation, which promised freedom to enslaved people who escaped to British lines, forced that contradiction into the open in ways that shaped the war's outcome.