Portal:Virginia

Portal topics: Activities; Culture; Geography; Health; History; Mathematics; Nature; People; Philosophy; Religion; Society; Technology; Random portal

The Virginia Portal

Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. The state's capital is Richmond and its most populous city is Virginia Beach. Its most populous subdivision is Fairfax County, part of Northern Virginia, where slightly over a third of Virginia's population of 8.7 million live.

Eastern Virginia is part of the Atlantic Plain, and the Middle Peninsula forms the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Central Virginia lies predominantly in the Piedmont, the foothill region of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which cross the western and southwestern parts of the state. The fertile Shenandoah Valley fosters the state's most productive agricultural counties, while the economy in Northern Virginia is driven by technology companies and U.S. federal government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency. Hampton Roads is also the site of the region's main seaport and Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval base. (Full article...)

Refresh with new selections below (purge)

edit

Selected article

The Pittston Coal strike was a United States labor union action led by the United Mine Workers Union (UMWA) against the Pittston Coal Company, nationally headquartered in Pittston, Pennsylvania. The strike, which lasted from April 5, 1989 to February 20, 1990, resulted from Pittston's termination of health care benefits for approximately 1,500 retirees, widows, and disabled miners. The strikers also cited the refusal of the company to contribute to the benefit trust established in 1950 for miners who retired before 1974 and the refusal of the company to bargain in good faith as grounds for their action. The company cited declining coal prices, decreasing demand, and recession as its reason for limiting health care benefits.

The strike affected production in mines mostly in Virginia, but a few in West Virginia and Kentucky as well. Mine workers and their families engaged in acts of civil disobedience, work stoppage, protests, and rallies. At its peak in June 1989, the strike involved approximately 2,000 miners daily staying at Camp Solidarity with thousands more sending donations and holding wildcat walkouts that involved around 40,000 people. The participation of women in the labor action through the ad hoc formation of the Daughters of Mother Jones—reminiscent of the early days of union organization—proved an essential element of the successful strike.

Article archive

Read more...

edit

Selected biography

John Warfield Johnston (1818 – 1889) was an American lawyer and politician from Abingdon, Virginia. He served in the Virginia State Senate, and represented Virginia in the United States Senate when the state was readmitted after the American Civil War. He was United States Senator for thirteen years; in national politics, he was a Democrat.

Johnston had been ineligible to serve in Congress because of the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbade anyone from holding public office who had sworn allegiance to the United States and subsequently sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. However, his restrictions were removed at the suggestion of the Freedmen's Bureau when he aided a sick and dying former slave after the War. He was the first person who had sided with the Confederacy to serve in the United States Senate.

He was caught in the middle during the debate over the Arlington Memorial. Johnston was an outspoken opponent of the Texas-Pacific Bill, a sectional struggle for control of railroads in the South, which figured in the Compromise of 1877. He was also an outspoken Funder during Virginia's heated debate as to how much of its pre-War debt the state ought to have been obliged to pay back. The controversy culminated in the formation of Readjuster Party and the appointment of William Mahone as its leader; this marked the end of Johnston's career in the Senate.

More biographies

Read more...

edit

This month in Virginia history

October 2002: The Beltway sniper attacks strike Northern Virginia
October 19, 1781: According to tradition, the "The World Turned Upside Down” is played at the Surrender of Yorktown. (Yorktown Victory Monument, pictured)
October 19, 1864: Union General Sheridan rides from Winchester to the Battle of Cedar Creek, rallying his troops and reversing the course of the battle.
October 23, 1995: The commercial Conestoga 1620 rocket is terminated during its failed launch at Wallops Island; its project is scrubbed shortly thereafter.
October 31, 1887: the 1887 Halloween tropical storm hits the Eastern seaboard, driving numerous vessels aground onto the Virginia coast

More about Virginia history

edit

Random Virginia article

A random generator will select an article about…

(note: generator may be slow)

edit

Things you can do

Join WikiProject Virginia

Tasks

Expand stub articles:
- Virginia stubs • Virginia geography stubs • Virginia politician stubs • Virginia school stubs
Assess:
- Assess articles that have tags but no quality or importance assessment.
Infoboxes are needed on these articles
Requested photos

edit

Selected image

Credit: James F. Gibson (1862)

Union Army battery of 10-inch Seacoast mortars at Yorktown for the Siege of Yorktown

More selected pictures

Read more

Did you know - load new batch

... that the 1988 closure of WLEE, once one of the top radio stations in Richmond, Virginia, also took WBBL, a church station in existence for nearly 65 years, off the air for good?
... that slave owner John Custis petitioned the Governor of Virginia to manumit a slave child whom he had fathered?
... that James Dillon Armstrong was a Virginia state senator, a delegate to West Virginia's constitutional convention, and a circuit court judge while serving for more than 43 years as a Presbyterian church elder?
... that Joseph Ranger was the longest-serving Black sailor in the American Revolutionary War's Virginia State Navy?
... that illustrator Abigail Larson once designed a wine-bottle label for the Edgar Allan Poe Museum?
... that three of the four Richmond Theatres were destroyed by fire, of which the 1811 fire was described as "early America's first great disaster"?