As the federal workforce grew during the Civil War, department heads began employing women, without any explicit authorization from Congress that they could do so. When Congress finally acknowledged the employment of women i…
Plantation owners in the Southern United States regularly furnished their enslaved workers with goods – clothing, shoes, axes, and shovels, that had been manufactured in the North. Many Northern manufacturers specifically ta…
In 1879, a group of Spiritualists purchased 20 acres of land, halfway between Buffalo, New York, and Erie, Pennsylvania. The gated community they created, now a hamlet of Pomfret, New York, became known as Lily Dale. Each su…
In the 1870s, 120 Chinese boys came to New England as part of the Chinese Educational Mission. The boys studied at prep schools and colleges, and while they continued their lessons in Chinese language and culture, they also …
When she was just fifteen years old, in 1830, Sarah Martha Sanders was sold to Richard Walpole Cogdell of Charleston, South Carolina. Within a year she was pregnant with his child, and just after she turned 17, Sarah Martha …
At the dedication for a school for African American students in Manassas, Virginia, in 1894, Frederick Douglass said: “no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earn…
In the Continental Army, one company of patriots in Charleston, South Carolina, was a majority Jewish, and at least fifteen Jewish soldiers in the Army achieved the rank of officer during the American Revolution, something u…
Abigail Smith Adams, wife to the second U.S. president and mother of the sixth U.S. president, may be best known for exhorting her husband to “remember the ladies” as he worked with his colleagues to form a new government, b…
In March 1778, while he was camped at Valley Forge, Commander in Chief George Washington sent a lock of his hair to the daughter of the New Jersey Governor. It wasn’t a romantic gift; rather, Washington was responding to a c…
Josephine McCarty, née Fagan, aka Mrs. Virginia S. Seymour, dba Emma Burleigh. M.D., was many things: mother, teacher, saleswoman, spy, lobbyist, and abortionist. And in 1872 she was also an accused murderer, after eyewitnes…
In 1817, the second state prison in New York opened in Auburn, situated on a fast-flowing river so waterpower could be used to run machinery in the factories that would be housed in the prison. In a new practice of incarcera…
As the Civil War was drawing to a close, President Lincoln was preparing for what came after, with plans for reunification of the country, and he began to advocate for limited suffrage for Black Americans. John Wilkes Booth’…
Shortly after New Orleans became a US city (via the Louisiana Purchase), the municipal council established one of the country’s first professional salaried police forces and began operation of Police Jail, both efforts aimed…
For several decades in the 20th Century, American universities, including elite institutions, took nude photos of their students, sometimes as often as twice a year, in order to evaluate their posture. In some cases students…
Journalist Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore traveled the world in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, writing books and hundreds of articles about such places as Alaska, Japan, China, India, and helping shape the journal of the Na…
