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 pe…
For Ericka Huggins, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which she attended at just 15 years old, was a turning point in her life, inspiring her toward activism. She later joined the Black Panther Party, and after b…
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 …
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 le…
The completion of the Panama Canal in 1914 positioned the United States as a global power, but the U.S. didn’t complete the feat single-handedly. It required land from Panama, equipment and information from the failed earlie…
On March 4, 1933, Frances Perkins was sworn in as the 4th Secretary of Labor. It was the first time in United States history that a woman served in the Cabinet, only 13 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment gave…
On June 15, 1933, the all-white, all-male Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed Florence Price’s award-winning Symphony Number 1 in E minor, the first institution of its caliber to play the work of a Black woman composer. It …
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…
Isabel Truesdell Kelly earned her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932, with a dissertation on the “Fundamentals of Great Basin Culture,” having researched the Northern Paiute and Coast Mi…
Shortly after he was born in 1971, Ryan White was diagnosed with severe hemophilia. Ryan was able to reduce his hospitalizations from the disease through the use of in-home injections of Factor VIII concentrate, something he…
In his bestselling childcare manual American pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock advised new moms:“If you begin to feel at all depressed, go to a movie, or to the beauty parlor, or to get yourself a new hat or dress.” Although p…
Between 1921 and 1948, every Southern and border state, except Delaware, set up scholarship programs to send Black students out of state for graduate study rather than admit them to historically white public colleges or buil…
In 1946, the National Football League began the process of reintegration after a “gentleman’s agreement” had stopped teams from hiring Black players for over a decade. Even as the NFL began to re-integrate, though, racist st…
At the Republican National Convention in July 1964, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s name was placed in nomination for the presidency, and she received votes from 27 delegates, the first time a woman was placed in nomina…
Even before Democrats met in Chicago in August to choose their presidential nominee, the year 1968 had been a turbulent, and often violent, time in the United States. In Chicago, the tumult of an open convention inside the I…
