Encyclopedia Virginia is collaborating with the Charlottesville company Cardboard Safari in order to make and distribute cardboard viewfinders to educators and librarians. By inserting your phone and pulling up 360-degree panoramas created by EV using Google Street View technology, you can walk through historic spaces and experience Virginia history in 3-D.

We think it's pretty cool, but don't take our word for it. Ask Ally Campo (above), a staff archaeologist at James Madison's Montpelier. She thought so too!

(Image by Peter Hedlund)

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August 2, 1776: Delegates to the Second Continental Congress sign the Declaration of Independence, including Carter Braxton, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Francis Lightfoot Lee, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Nelson Jr., and George Wythe.

August 9, 1864: Captain John Maxwell of the Confederate Secret Service leaves a self-detonating time bomb at the port of Union-occupied City Point. The bomb kills 58 people and wounds 126; collateral damage is estimated at $4 million.

August 18, 1587: Elinor White Dare gives birth to Virginia Dare on Roanoke Island. Elinor White Dare's father is the colony's governor, John White, and her husband, Ananias Dare, is one of White's advisers. The baby is the first born to English parents in North America.

August 19–20, 1969: Hurricane Camille lands in Virginia. The storm's unexpected arrival leads to flash floods, extensive road damage, downed communication lines, damaged homes, and more than 100 deaths.

August 30, 1800: A planned slave revolt led by a blacksmith named Gabriel (owned by Thomas Prosser, of Henrico County) is thwarted when a huge storm delays the meeting of conspirators and a few nervous slaves reveal the plot to their masters.

August 31, 1970: After Governor A. Linwood Holton enrolls his children in the majority black inner-city schools to which they are assigned under a federal court–mandated plan to achieve racial desegregation in the Richmond Public Schools, he is photographed escorting his daughter Tayloe into the nearly all-black John F. Kennedy High School in Richmond.