Civil War Museum Exhibit

This project has ended, but you can still make your gift by visiting give.vt.edu or by calling 800-533-1144.

We invite you to help VT history students make a difference by sharing their research with the public and Virginia schoolchildren. We are a team of faculty and students, from Virginia Tech's Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, creating an exhibit for the American Civil War Museum in Appomattox.

The exhibit, “Enacting Freedom: Black Virginians in the Age of Emancipation,” will be on display from April 2019 through April 2020. It begins with a question: what did freedom mean to African Americans after the end of slavery? Freedom to do what? Freedom from what? Politics and voting were important, but they were never the whole story. Instead, former slaves fought to make freedom meaningful by securing an education for their children, by claiming new economic opportunities, by reuniting families torn apart by slavery.

Our exhibit will combine original artifacts, innovative visuals, and rigorously-researched interpretation to tell the incredible stories of black Virginians who struggled, survived, and thrived through the tumultuous Civil War and Reconstruction years.

And it’s all based on the hard work of VT history students.

Your donation will help in one of two ways: allowing us to build the highest-quality exhibit possible; and enabling us to share our research with Virginia schoolchildren by offering funded field trips.

Through its elementary school outreach program, the Traveling Trunk of Civil War History (right), the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies knows well how much the younger crowd appreciates hand-on history. By facilitating elementary school visits, including those from under-resourced school districts, subsidized field trips will ensure that our exhibit has a deeper and more lasting impact.

Thank you for your support!