Sometimes excavating American history involves more virtual digging than it does plying the soil with trowels. Sometimes it’s less about reassembling broken pottery than it is about reassembling broken information that’s buried just beneath the surface. It is this sort of excavating that has formed much of the mission for the Community Historical Archaeology Project with Schools (CHAPS) Program at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, as illustrated by one of its initiatives, the Rio Grande Valley Civil War Trail.Origins of the ProjectEarly in the spring of 2012, CHAPS co-directors…

Archaeology is the study of the past—people and everything they were, their public acts and private hopes—or at least it is an earnest attempt to “construct” this past through a meticulous examination of material objects, the greater landscape, and the social milieu under which these men, women, and children lived and died. In myriad ways, history preserves with greatest clarity the dominant narrative of society, but its alternative voices and experiences are inevitably less well-known, often willfully suppressed, and occasionally all but lost. The power of archaeology is that it can literally…

The North Cascades Mountains have a reputation as being steeper and more snow covered than most other mountains of the far western United States. Native people (also “American Indians” or “Native Americans”) thrived in these mountains for thousands of years and their languages, songs, and stories preserved essential details of their homeland, of environmental and social events, of their families’ histories, and of how specific places were created and named. Native villages, tribes, and nations of the North Cascades spoke, and still speak, several dialects of Salish (SAY-leesh), the general…

The first large-scale archaeological excavation in New York City took place in the Wall Street district in 1979–1980. The project came about when the developers of the office building that became the headquarters of Goldman Sachs had to “dedesignate,” or undo, the site’s prior designation as a New York City Landmark. The landmarked building had been torn down a decade earlier and its façade was to be re-erected at another site, but the façade had been lost. In addition, preservation practices had changed, and archaeologists had begun to dig up downtown. So the Landmarks Preservation Commission…

All historians are at heart detectives, carefully sifting through the records of the past we find in archives, museums, and sometimes musty attics. But letters, diaries, and speeches are far from the only sources that provide us the clues we need to reconstruct the past. Material culture—the “things” that survive long after the people who made or used them have vanished—also holds critical clues to the past. Much of what we know about ancient civilizations, and more recent ones as well, comes from those intrepid archaeologists who meticulously examine the brick and mortar records of cultures…

In 1914, a Massachusetts woman named Claiborne Catlin decided to ride across the state on horseback to rally support for women’s suffrage. All of her personal belongings, including a khaki jacket and divided skirt donated by Filene’s department store plus a parcel of leaflets, a horse blanket, and a white, green, and gold “Votes for Women” sash, had to fit in a pair of brown canvas saddlebags. Relying entirely on donations along the way to cover her expenses, she organized fifty-nine meetings, visited thirty-seven cities and towns, and covered 530 miles over the course of four months. As a…

As we mark the centennial of women’s constitutional right to vote, we should remember that the Nineteenth Amendment, like the suffrage movement itself, was forced to navigate an arduous path. Even at the endgame, even at the dawn of the second decade of the twentieth century, the idea of women holding the ballot was still controversial and contested, the final skirmishes were grueling and bitter, and the success of the amendment was in grave doubt until the very last moment. When Congress finally passed the amendment in June 1919—after stalling for forty years, and after voting it down twenty…

The League of Women Voters (LWV) was founded in 1920 by American suffragists, just months before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the constitutional right to vote after more than seventy years of struggle. Over the past one hundred years the League, following in the progressive politics of its mother organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), has been an influential and powerful women’s coalition. An activist, grassroots organization, the League believes that citizens should play a critical role in civic advocacy. Its founders believed that…

Most histories of women gaining the right to vote in the United States begin in July of 1848, when hundreds of activists gathered in Seneca Falls to hold the first women’s rights convention and sign the Declaration of Sentiments. The Museum of the American Revolution’s upcoming exhibition, When Women Lost the Vote: A Revolutionary Story, 1776–1807, however, suggests that the timeline of women’s suffrage in America did not begin in 1848. Rather, it can be traced back to the eighteenth century, during the years of the Revolutionary War and the decades after independence, when the ideological…

Although it may be hard to believe today, not everyone wanted women to have the right to vote. In fact, during the early nineteenth century, very few people thought women capable of political engagement of any kind. As the century progressed the women’s suffrage movement steadily increased its membership. By the 1890s, in response to the growing attention suffragists garnered, some women established organizations with the goal of preventing themselves from gaining the right to vote. They had many reasons for doing this, and their arguments changed over time. Perhaps their greatest fear about…