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A podcast about people and events in American history you may not know much about. Yet.
At the end of August 1787, after three long months of debate and deliberation, the Constitutional Convention had neared the end of its work. They were poised at that time to write into the Constitution that the President of t...
One hundred fifty years ago, President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act establishing Yellowstone National Park into law, making it the first national park in the United States, and a cause for celebration in a country still rec...
In the decades following the Civil War, African Americans reliably voted for the Republican Party, which had led the efforts to outlaw slavery and enfranchise Black voters; and white southerners reliably voted for the Democra...
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...
Throughout her life, Shirley Chisholm fought for coalitional change. She was the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress in 1968, the first Black woman to run for President of the United States in 1972, co-fou...
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...
Ruth Reynolds, born in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1916 to a strict Methodist family, may have seemed an unlikely ally to the cause of Puerto Rican independence, but she devoted her life to what she saw as her “sacred ...
In March 1972, Selma James distributed a pamphlet that declared: “If we raise kids, we have a right to a living wage. . . WE DEMAND WAGES FOR HOUSEWORK. All housekeepers are entitled to wages. (Men too).” Soon it was a global...
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: ...
The Universal Negro Improvement Association is often most closely associated with Marcus Garvey, but from the beginning, the work of women was essential to the development of the organization. Amy Ashwood co-founded the UNIA ...
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...
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 be...
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...
Producer & Host
Kelly has always been the kind of person who asks questions — lots of questions — to anyone who will listen and answer. With a BA in Religious Studies from Northwestern University and an MA in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara (where she wrote a thesis on feminist witches), Kelly has turned her questioning to politics and history where she digs deep into stories that aren’t getting enough attention.
By day Kelly is an administrator at the University of Chicago, where she has worked since 2004.
Kelly lives on the southside of Chicago with her husband, two kids, and two cats. When she’s not podcasting or working you can find Kelly with knitting needles in her hands. If she could knit and podcast at the same time she would.