About Virginia

Virginia was named in honor of Queen Elizabeth I of England, who was known as the Virgin Queen because she never married and had no heirs. Sir Walter Raleigh, who sponsored the failed Roanoke colony in the 1580s, used the name Virginia for the entire eastern coast of North America claimed by England, as a tribute to Elizabeth's patronage. When the Virginia Company established the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown in 1607, the name Virginia was retained for the colony. Virginia became the most populous and prosperous of the British colonies, producing more tobacco than any other, and gave the new nation four of its first five presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.

Virginia is a state of profound contradictions held in tense coexistence. It is simultaneously the birthplace of American democracy and the place where race-based chattel slavery was first codified in English law. It produced Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, the architects of a republic, and also the generals and politicians of the Confederacy, who nearly destroyed it. It built the Pentagon and fills it with the most powerful military machine in human history, while also hosting Monticello, where a man who wrote that all men are created equal kept 600 of them in bondage.

Geographically, Virginia is split between worlds. Northern Virginia is an extension of metropolitan Washington, dense, wealthy, diverse, and dominated by the federal government and the technology industry. Richmond is a city actively reckoning with its Confederate past while gentrifying at speed. Hampton Roads is a military fortress and the cradle of English American history in the same stretch of coastline. The Shenandoah Valley and Appalachian southwest are rural, agricultural, and increasingly left behind by an economy centered elsewhere.

Politically, Virginia was reliably Republican for most of the twentieth century. In 2008, Barack Obama carried it for the first time since Lyndon Johnson. By the 2010s it had two Democratic senators. By 2019 Democrats held the state legislature. The transformation, driven primarily by the growth of Northern Virginia and a diversifying electorate, is one of the most dramatic political shifts any state has undergone in a generation.