On the slave ships that sailed between Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and the West Coast of Africa from the 16th through the 19th Centuries, the crews included not just white sailors but also Black mariners, including a significa...
Amelia Jenks Bloomer was many things: writer and publisher, public speaker, temperance reformer, advocate for women’s rights and dress reform, and adoptive mother. She was not the inventor of the trousers for women that came ...
My guest today is Dr. Martha S. Jones , the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, professor of history, and a professor at the SNF Agora Institute at the Johns Hopkins University and author of The Trouble of Color: ...
After emancipation, formerly enslaved Black Americans knew that the key to economic freedom was land ownership, but as soon as they began to acquire land, local tax assessors began to overassess their land and exact steep pen...
Thousands of years ago, a band of Cahuilla Indians migrated south into the Coachella Valley, calling the area Séc-he, meaning boiling water. The Mexicans translated this as agua caliente (hot water), which is the name still u...
In 1865, when Black people in Mississippi first gained the legal right to marriage, so-called Black Codes outlawed interracial marriage, punishable by life in prison. Five years later, Republicans in the Mississippi state leg...
Henry Christophe, one of the heroes of the Haitian Revolution, was, from 1811 to his death in 1820, King Henry I of the Kingdom of Haiti, the first, last, and only King that Haiti ever had. This week we look at Christophe’s m...
If you were to head to Paris in the mid-eighteenth Century and ask for a restaurant, you might be handed a bowl of meat bouillon, prepared in such a way as to improve vigor and perhaps even sperm production. Restaurant referr...
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 in...
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 tar...
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 sum...
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 l...
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 g...
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 earne...
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 un...
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, bu...
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 co...
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 eyewitness...
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 incarcerat...
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’s...
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 Nat...
In 1812, when the United States was still a young nation and its State Department was tiny, American citizens began heading around the world as Christian missionaries. Early in the 19th Century, the US government often saw mi...
