58 items
In October 2021, the African Burial Ground National Monument commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the New York City slave cemetery’s rediscovery by the General Services Administration (GSA). In 1991, the GSA started construction...
The Escape of Black Women during the American Revolution
In 1961, Morgan State University historian Dr. Benjamin Quarles published the now classic study The Negro in the American Revolution , which became the definitive account of the role African Americans played in the War for...
Women and Wagoners: Camp Followers in the American War for Independence
An old tune called "The Girl I Left Behind Me" tells of a lovelorn soldier yearning to return home to his waiting fair maid. Although there is a good chance that this song was fifed during the Revolutionary War, the earliest...
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Voices of Democracy: Jovita Idár, the Idár Family, and the Struggle against Juan Crow
In August 2023, the US Mint will release the Jovita Idár quarter, “the ninth coin in the American Women Quarters Program” authorized by Public Law 116–330. On its website, the Mint states that Idár’s “ideas and practices were ahead of...
Antonia Pantoja, a Nuyorican Builder of Institutions
Antonia Pantoja was a fierce community organizer and builder of influential institutions. Throughout her life she created organizations that enhanced the lives of Puerto Ricans and other minoritized communities. She was a dreamer with...
파도와 메아리: Waves and Echoes of Korean Migration to the United States
According to the 2020 US Census, 1.9 million Korean Americans reside in the United States. Among Asian Americans, they are the fifth-largest ethnic group and primarily reside in California, New York, Hawaii, and Texas. [1] This essay...
From Citizen to Enemy: The Tragedy of Japanese Internment
Although World War II is covered in most school curricula, the story of American citizens who were stripped of their civil liberties here, on American soil, during that war is often omitted. Yet what happened to first-generation...
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The Rise (and Fall) of the First Ku Klux Klan
Some of the historical details in this essay could be disturbing for younger readers. In 1866, a group of defeated Confederate veterans created the Ku Klux Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee. The group consisted of the local newspaper editor,...
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Nancy Ward, Cherokee Beloved Woman
In 1755 a Cherokee woman named Nanye’hi accompanied a war party, which included her husband Kingfisher. At Taliwa in what today is north Georgia, the Cherokees engaged the enemy Creek Indians in battle. Nanye’hi crouched behind a log...
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Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) and the National Council of American Indians: Leading the Way for Indigenous Self-Representation
Born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in 1876, the same year as the Battle of Greasy Grass (known more commonly in US history as the Battle of Little Big Horn), Gertrude Simmons Bonnin grew up amidst a US-national culture of systemic...
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The Heart and Soul of Fannie Lou Hamer, An Extraordinary African American Leader
Fannie Lou Hamer was born October 6, 1917, in Montgomery County, Mississippi, to Ella and James Lee Townsend (her sharecropping parents), who taught her to never quit in her endeavors-a creed she tried to live by her entire life. Of...
The Persistence of Ida B. Wells: Reform Leader and Civil Rights Activist
In an 1892 speech, Ida B. Wells told her audience, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” [1] She lived these words, determinedly and vocally confronting every social injustice she encountered. Wells (1862...
Ten Ways to Teach Rosa Parks
Adapted and reprinted with permission from The Nation [Issue of December 1, 2015] On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Her courageous action galvanized a yearlong community...
Constance Baker Motley: A Trailblazer in the Legal Profession
Gary L. Ford Jr. , an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York, is the author of Constance Baker Motley: One Woman’s Fight for Civil Rights and Equal Justice under Law (2017) and a co...
The History of Women’s Baseball
From 1943 to 1954, "America’s pastime" was a game played in skirts. At its peak in 1948, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) fielded ten teams in midwestern towns like Rockford, Illinois (Peaches); South Bend,...
The Righteous Revolution of Mercy Otis Warren
Seven months after British Regulars marched on Lexington and Concord, three months after King George III declared the colonies in a state of rebellion, and a month after British artillery leveled the town of Falmouth (now Portland,...
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Unruly Americans in the Revolution
Nearly all of the blockbuster biographies of the Founding Fathers—whether the subject is George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, or John Adams—portray the vast majority of ordinary Americans as mere bystanders. Although the authors of...
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Female Trouble: Andrew Jackson versus the Ladies of Washington
Andrew Jackson was mad. It was February 1829, a wintry day in Washington, DC, and President-elect Jackson was in a fury about the public’s reaction to his Cabinet announcements. To be fair, Jackson was already angry when he arrived in...
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The Years of Magical Thinking: Explaining the Salem Witchcraft Crisis
Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from semi-mythical events such as the First Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and Salem witchcraft....
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Women of the West
Women are like water to Western history. Both have flowed through the terrain we have come to call the West, long before the inhabitants conceived of themselves as part of an expanding United States. Both have been represented as...
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The World War II Home Front
World War II had a profound impact on the United States. Although no battles occurred on the American mainland, the war affected all phases of American life. It required unprecedented efforts to coordinate strategy and tactics with...
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Women and the Great Depression
In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt’s It’s Up to the Women exhorted American women to help pull the country through its current economic crisis, the gravest it had ever faced: "The women know that life must go on and that the needs of life must...
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The Slave Narratives: A Genre and a Source
The autobiographies of ex-slaves in America are the foundation of an African American literary tradition, as well as unique glimpses into the souls of slaves themselves. The roughly sixty-five to seventy slave narratives published in...
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The Origins and Legacy of the Pennsylvania Quakers
Enthusiastic religious conviction among rustic Quakers contributed much to what seems civilized and refined about American culture and society. Although the movement later attracted intellectual and genteel members, Quakerism began as...
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