Virginia Museum of History & Culture

The Virginia Museum of History & Culture (VMHC), located on Arthur Ashe Boulevard in Richmond, Virginia, is the state's largest and most comprehensive history museum, housing a collection of more than nine million artifacts, documents, photographs, and library holdings spanning the full arc of Virginia's history from the pre-Columbian era to the 20th century. The museum is administered by the Virginia Historical Society, founded in 1831, making it one of the oldest historical societies in the South. The permanent galleries are organized thematically and chronologically, beginning with the Indigenous peoples of Virginia's river valleys and coastal plains before European contact and moving through the colonial era, the Revolutionary period, the Civil War and Confederacy, the Jim Crow era, and Virginia's 20th-century transformations. The Civil War collection is among the most extensive anywhere, comprising weapons, uniforms, personal effects, regimental flags, and documentary materials from both Union and Confederate sides. The collection of Confederate battle flags, numbering more than 500, is one of the largest in the world. The museum's treatment of Virginia's history of slavery and racial injustice has expanded substantially in recent decades. Permanent galleries on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and on Black Virginia from emancipation through the Civil Rights Movement integrate material culture with oral history and documentary evidence. The Loving Story exhibit examines the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws in a legal struggle with origins in Caroline County, Virginia. Temporary exhibitions rotate regularly and have addressed topics from Virginia's role in World War II to the history of the Chesapeake Bay environment. The Stuart Family Research Center on the building's lower level provides genealogical and archival resources to researchers by appointment, with extensive holdings of Virginia county records, plantation inventories, and family papers.