Virginia Standards of Learning Virginia Studies

1.A class walks a giant map from the Atlantic beaches inland to the high southwest. Which list names Virginia's five regions in that east-to-west order?

2.Boats coming upriver from the Chesapeake Bay had to stop where waterfalls and rapids blocked the channel. What is that boundary called?

3.Fresh river water mixes with salt water from the Atlantic inside a broad, sheltered arm of the sea. Which body of water is that?

4.Arlington and Alexandria look across a wide river at Washington, D.C. Which river forms that boundary with Maryland?

5.Which river crosses much of Virginia, drops at Richmond, passes the site of Jamestown, and enters the Chesapeake Bay?

6.A fishing town sits on a long finger of land that the Chesapeake Bay cuts off from the rest of Virginia. Which region is that finger part of?

7.In Wise County, families talk about jobs in mines cut into rugged hills. Which geographic region are they talking about?

8.Between the waterfalls near Richmond and the first high ridges to the west, the land is a wide band of rolling hills. Which region is that?

9.Many Virginia rivers begin as small streams in a chain of old, rounded mountains between the Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley. Which chain is that?

10.Orchards, limestone caverns, and long parallel ridges fill the country just west of the Blue Ridge. Which region is the Shenandoah Valley part of?

11.In the 1600s, Virginia's route to England for people, letters, and tobacco was the salt water on the state's eastern edge. Which body of water was that?

12.Which group names four Virginia rivers that flow into the Chesapeake Bay?

13.A mapmaker shades every state that touches Virginia's land border. Which list is complete?

14.Rain that falls west of Virginia's Eastern Continental Divide, including water in the New River, is most likely to end up where?

15.Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Petersburg all grew where boats from the bay met falls. What do those four cities share?

16.Newport News builds large ships, and a major naval base fills the harbor at Norfolk. Those workplaces sit in which region?

17.Who were the first people living in the land that became Virginia?

18.When the English landed, Powhatan led a powerful alliance in the Coastal Plain. Which language family did his people speak?

19.The Monacan people lived along the rivers above the falls, in the country around today's Lynchburg and the upper James. Which region was their home?

20.Iroquoian-speaking peoples, including Cherokee towns and hunting lands, were most closely tied to which part of Virginia?

21.In 1607 one leader collected tribute from many tribes around the York and James rivers. The English used his title as the name of his people. Who was he?

22.Coastal Plain farmers planted corn, beans, and squash together so the stalks held up the beans and the squash shaded the soil. What were these three crops called?

23.Students screening soil near a river find broken clay pots, a stone point, and shells. Nobody wrote a diary of that camp. How can anyone still learn about it?

24.Powhatan directed his alliance from a town on the York River, not from the English fort. What was that town called?

25.A Coastal Plain village harvested corn from its fields and also took fish and oysters from nearby water. Which statement best explains that diet?

26.Powhatan houses were framed with bent poles and covered with mats or bark. Why did that building style fit the Coastal Plain?

27.A stone spear point buried deep in a Virginia river terrace is thousands of years older than the English fort. What does that find show?

28.The Pamunkey and Mattaponi still have small reservations that grew out of treaties with the English colony. Where are those reservations?

29.In the 2010s, the United States formally recognized several Virginia Indian tribes, including the Monacan and the Rappahannock. What did that step acknowledge?

30.In the 1920s, state registrar Walter Plecker used Virginia records to label Virginia Indians as another race. What was one result?

31.Which settlement was the first permanent English settlement in Virginia?

32.Which ships brought the first successful English settlers up the James River in 1607?

33.Stockholders in London paid for the ships and supplies that started the English colony on the James. What did they mainly hope to get back?

34.During the winter of 1609-1610, food ran out at the James River fort and most of the settlers died. The ground around them was marshy and the drinking water was poor. What is that winter called?

35.Captain John Smith told the settlers that those who would not work would not eat. What was he trying to do?

36.Around 1612 John Rolfe began raising a mild West Indian tobacco that buyers in England wanted. How did that crop change the colony?

37.Pocahontas, a daughter of Powhatan, was held by the English, later married John Rolfe, and traveled to England. What is a well-supported result of that marriage?

38.In 1619 elected representatives of the colonists met by the James River to make local laws. What was that body called?

39.In 1619 an English ship brought Africans, taken from a Portuguese slave ship, into Virginia and traded them for supplies. Where did they land?

40.The Virginia Company recruited a larger group of women to sail for the colony around 1620. Why did leaders think their arrival mattered?

41.By the early 1700s, large planters depended on enslaved Africans to grow tobacco. Which statement fits that system?

42.A young Englishman signed a contract to work several years in Virginia in exchange for his ocean crossing. What was he?

43.A 1662 Virginia law said a child born in the colony was free or enslaved according to the status of the mother. Whom did that rule trap?

44.In 1622 Opechancanough led a coordinated attack that killed hundreds of English colonists along the James. What did that attack show?

45.In 1624 the king took Virginia away from the company that had founded it, after war and years of poor management. What did Virginia become?

46.Near the end of the 1600s, Virginia moved its capital off the swampy Jamestown peninsula to higher ground called Middle Plantation. What was the new capital named?

47.A planter pays a debt by delivering tobacco to a warehouse and taking a receipt. What does that scene show about money in colonial Virginia?

48.A blacksmith repairs a farmer's plow and takes ham and corn instead of coins. What is that exchange called?

49.In 1676 Nathaniel Bacon led frontier settlers against Governor William Berkeley, and Jamestown was burned. What was that conflict called?

50.Before the Revolution, Virginians were taxed to support one official church. Which church was it?

51.Which description best fits where most white Virginians lived in the mid-1700s?

52.The Virginia Company's charters said the settlers kept the rights of people living in England. Why did colonists later lean on that promise?

53.After the French and Indian War, Parliament taxed newspapers and legal papers in the colonies. Virginians objected because they elected no members of that Parliament. Which idea names the objection?

54.In March 1775, at St. John's Church in Richmond, a lawyer urged Virginia to arm for war and closed with a demand for liberty or death. Who spoke?

55.A committee asked a Virginian to draft the paper that listed complaints against King George III and declared the colonies free. Who was the main author?

56.In June 1776 George Mason wrote a statement of freedoms for Virginians, including a free press and protections for people accused of crimes. What was it called?

57.Jefferson drafted a Virginia law, passed in 1786, that stopped the state from taxing people to support one church and protected each person's worship. What was that law?

58.The Continental Congress needed a commander who could hold a poorly supplied army together through a long war. Which Virginian took that job?

59.In December 1775, near Norfolk, Virginia militia defeated troops loyal to the royal governor at a causeway over a marsh. Which battle was that?

60.In 1775 the royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to some enslaved men who would fight for the British. How did many white Virginians who enslaved people respond?

61.On a night in 1781, Jack Jouett rode from Louisa County to Charlottesville to warn Jefferson and the legislature that British cavalry were coming. What was the point of the ride?

62.In October 1781 a British army, trapped on a peninsula between allied troops and a French fleet, surrendered. Where did that happen?

63.During the siege of Yorktown, British rescue ships could not reach Cornwallis. Who controlled the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay?

64.An enslaved Virginian entered the British lines by pretending he had run away, then secretly reported British plans to the Marquis de Lafayette. Who was he?

65.In 1780 Virginia moved its capital from Williamsburg to Richmond. Which pair of reasons best fits that choice?

66.White Virginians did not all make the same choice in the Revolutionary War. Which statement is accurate?

67.A Virginia delegate kept the fullest notes of the 1787 convention and argued for a stronger national government. He is often called the Father of the Constitution. Who was he?

68.George Mason attended the Constitutional Convention but refused to sign the finished plan. What was his main public reason?

69.James Madison introduced amendments that protect speech, religion, the press, and fair treatment in court. What are the first ten amendments called?

70.Who was the first president of the United States, a Virginian whose home, Mount Vernon, looks over the Potomac?

71.In 1803 President Jefferson agreed to buy an enormous western claim from France, even though he doubted the Constitution spelled out that power. What was the purchase called?

72.In 1823 a president from Virginia warned European powers not to start new colonies in the Americas. What was that warning called?

73.At Monticello, near Charlottesville, Jefferson designed a famous house and held hundreds of people in slavery. How should that fact sit beside the Declaration he wrote?

74.In his last years Jefferson planned a public university at Charlottesville, with a lawn, teaching pavilions, and a library rotunda. Which school is it?

75.Before the Civil War, dealers in Richmond sold enslaved people to buyers from the cotton states. What does that show about Virginia's economy?

76.In 1831 an enslaved preacher led a revolt in Southampton County. It was crushed, and the state answered with harsher controls. Who led the revolt?

77.In 1859 a band seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, hoping to arm enslaved people and spark a wider rising. The leader was captured and hanged. Who was he?

78.Virginia did not leave the Union on the day Lincoln was elected. When did the state convention vote to secede?

79.After Virginia seceded, the Confederate government moved its capital from Montgomery, Alabama, to a Virginia city with factories and rail lines. Which city?

80.Many counties west of the Alleghenies refused to accept Virginia's secession. What new state came out of that break in 1863?

81.In 1861 three enslaved men escaped to Fort Monroe, and General Benjamin Butler refused to return them, calling them contraband of war. Why did that matter?

82.In July 1861, sightseers rode out from Washington expecting a quick Union victory at a creek the North called Bull Run. Confederates won instead. What did the battle teach both sides?

83.In December 1862, Union soldiers charged Marye's Heights toward Confederates sheltered by a stone wall and were thrown back with heavy losses. Which battle was this?

84.In March 1862 the Union Monitor and the Confederate Virginia fought in Hampton Roads. The Virginia had been rebuilt on the hull of the captured Merrimack. What was the result?

85.Which description best fits how Virginians lined up in the Civil War?

86.In 1863 Lee won a daring battle in the woods west of Fredericksburg, but a Confederate general was shot by his own side and later died. Who was he?

87.For more than nine months, Grant's army besieged a railroad city south of Richmond. When those lines broke in April 1865, both that city and Richmond had to be given up. Which city was besieged?

88.On April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in a village parlor. Where did they meet?

89.Which amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States after the Civil War?

90.The Fourteenth Amendment says people born in the United States are citizens and that no state may deny any person the equal protection of the laws. Why did that language matter for formerly enslaved Virginians?

91.The Fifteenth Amendment says the right to vote shall not be denied because of race, color, or having been enslaved. Who gained a constitutional voting right from it?

92.After the war, a federal office helped start schools where formerly enslaved people of many ages learned to read. Which office was it?

93.A freed family farms a landowner's field, buys seed on credit, and pays the rent with part of the harvest. After a bad year they owe more than the crop brought. What system is this?

94.Virginia's 1902 constitution required a poll tax and a difficult reading test before a person could register to vote. What was the main effect?

95.By the early 1900s, Virginia law required separate train cars and separate schools for Black and white people. What was that system of forced separation called?

96.In 1903 a Richmond teacher chartered the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank and served as its president. She is remembered as the first African American woman to found a bank and lead it in the United States. Who was she?

97.Which president was born in Staunton, Virginia, and led the United States through World War I?

98.A graduate of Virginia Military Institute in Lexington directed the United States Army during World War II, then proposed a plan to rebuild Western Europe. Who was he?

99.In 1951 a sixteen-year-old student led a walkout at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville to protest overcrowded, tar-paper classrooms. Who was she?

100.Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson carried the Prince Edward County school case toward the United States Supreme Court. What were they challenging?

101.In 1954 the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools violate the Constitution. A Virginia case from Prince Edward County was part of that ruling. What was the ruling called?

102.After Brown, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. led a state effort to block school integration, and some localities closed public schools. What was that policy called?

103.Which Richmonder became the first African American man to win the Wimbledon tennis tournament and then used that fame to support civil rights?

104.In 1970 Governor Linwood Holton walked his children into a largely Black Richmond public school. What did that act support?

105.Voters elected L. Douglas Wilder governor of Virginia in 1989. Why was that result a national first?

106.The legislature that began as the House of Burgesses still meets in Richmond. What are the two houses of the General Assembly today?

107.Which official leads Virginia's executive branch, serves a four-year term, and may not serve another term immediately afterward?

108.A new resident in Arlington works for a software firm that serves a federal agency. A cousin in Newport News welds on a ship, and a cousin in the Shenandoah Valley raises poultry. What does this family show about Virginia today?