Virginia is one of the fifty states of the United States, located on the East Coast along the Atlantic Ocean. Nicknamed "the Old Dominion", Virginia was the location of the first permanent English settlement in North America, Jamestown, which was founded in 1607 by Separatists. The Colony of Virginia crushed the Powhatan tribe and used slave labor to bring wealth to the colony, with cotton, tobacco, rice, and other goods being cultivated by slaves on plantations. The state was the most industrialized of the southern states at the time of the American Civil War, and it seceded to join the Confederate States of America due to slavery being a major party of the economy. Its capital, Richmond, served as the Confederate capital under Jefferson Davis, and the state was recaptured in 1865 at the end of the civil war. Since the end of the civil war, Virginia has since grown into an economoc center, with agriculture in the Shenandoah Valley, federal agencies such as the Department of Defense and CIA in the north, and the military seaports of Norfolk and Hampton Roads. In 2015, the state had a population of 8,382,998 people, with 63.1% being white, 19.7% African-Americans, 8.9% Hispanics, 6.3% Asians, and .5% Native Americans.
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