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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. Hampton Roads is also the site of the region's main seaport and Naval Station Norfolk, the world's largest naval base. (Full article...)

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The Great Dismal Swamp maroons were freed and escaped slaves who inhabited the marshlands of the Great Dismal Swamp, an area of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina.

At the beginning of the 18th century, maroons came to live in the swamp, most settling on mesic islands, the high and dry parts of the swamp. Inhabitants included slaves who had purchased their freedom, as well as escaped slaves. Other escaped slaves used the swamp as a route on the Underground Railroad as they made their way further north. Nearby whites often left enslaved maroons alone so long as they paid a quota in logs or shingles, and businesses may have ignored the fugitive nature of escaped slaves who provided work in exchange for trade goods.

Although conditions were harsh, research suggests that thousands lived there between about 1700 and the 1860s. While the precise number of maroons who lived in the swamp at that time is unknown, it is believed to have been one of the largest maroon colonies in the United States. Harriett Beecher Stowe told the maroon people's story in her 1856 novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.

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Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 (April 2, 1743 O.S.) – July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the third President of the United States. Jefferson served in the Continental Congress representing Virginia, then as a wartime Governor of Virginia. After the war ended, Jefferson served as a diplomat stationed in Paris, and later United States Minister to France. Elected president in the Revolution of 1800, he oversaw the purchase of the vast Louisiana Territory, and sent the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the new west.

A leader in the Enlightenment, Jefferson was a polymath who spoke five languages fluently and was deeply interested in science, invention, architecture, religion and philosophy, interests that led him to the founding of the University of Virginia. He designed his own mansion on a 5,000 acre plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia, which he named Monticello. Jefferson was a skilled writer and corresponded with many influential people in America and Europe throughout his adult life. Though Jefferson has been criticized by many modern day scholars over the issue of slavery, he remains rated as one of the greatest U.S. presidents.

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This month in Virginia history

November 7, 1775: Lord Dunmore's Proclamation (pictured) declares martial law throughout the Colony of Virginia.
November 19, 1718: On the orders of Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood, a fleet commanded by Robert Maynard departs Hampton in search of notorious pirate Blackbeard; on the 22nd they engage and kill him in coastal North Carolina.

November 27, 1926: Restoration and reconstruction begins on Colonial Williamsburg
November 27–December 2, 1863: The Battle of Mine Run was the last combat of the year for the Eastern Theater of the American Civil War .

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Monticello, the self-designed home of Thomas Jefferson, in Albemarle County, Virginia

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... that after Lew Dickey Sr. broke into the radio business by buying a station in West Virginia, his son would go on to own Cumulus Media?
... that in the span of three days, a Florida man was approved by bankruptcy courts to buy TV stations in Roanoke and Lynchburg, Virginia, and then arrested on charges of laundering millions in drug money?
... that slave owner John Custis petitioned the Governor of Virginia to manumit a slave child whom he had fathered?
... that the general manager of a West Virginia TV station called changing its network affiliation "the hardest decision I've ever had to make"?
... that a neighborhood in Virginia lost its public park because its city government did not build a fence?
... that William H. Davis was the first teacher of Booker T. Washington and the first African American to be nominated as a candidate for West Virginia governor in 1888?