Starting in November 1861, the Union Army held the city of Beaufort, South Carolina, using the Sea Islands as a southern base of operations in the Civil War. Harriet Tubman joined the Army there, debriefing freedom seekers wh...
Today, Americans consume 400 pounds of ice a year, each. That would have been unfathomable to people in the 18th century, but a number of innovators and ice barons in the 19th and 20th centuries changed the way we think about...
If you’re like most Americans – or most people on earth – you have a pair of jeans, or maybe five, in your wardrobe. There’s a decent chance you’re wearing jeans right now. These humble pants were invented by a Reno tailor in...
In 1812, the United States Congress voted to provide $50,000 to assist victims of a horrific earthquake in the far-away country of Venezuela. It would be another nine decades before the US again provided aid for recovery effo...
In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the last slave ship landed in the United States from Africa. The transatlantic slave trade had been illegal in the US since 1808, but Alabama enslaver Timothy Meaher and his friends were ...
In 1830, amid the Second Great Awakening in the burned-over district of New York State, Joseph Smith, Jr., and Oliver Cowdery ordained each other as the first two elders in what they then called the Church of Christ. Within e...
The beginning of the Civil Rights Movement is often dated to sometime in the middle of the 1950s, but the roots of it stretch back much further. The NAACP, which calls itself “the nation's largest and most widely recognized c...
When Europeans arrived in the Great Lakes region, they learned from the Indigenous people living there of a route from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, made possible by a portage connecting the Chicago River and the Des Plaines ...
Before Europeans landed in North America, five Indigenous nations around what would become New York State came together to form the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. When the Europeans arrived, the French called them the Iroquois Co...
During the 19th Century, the Northern Cheyenne people made a number of treaties with the United States government, but the U.S. repeatedly failed to honor its end of the treaties. In November 1876, the U.S. Army, still fuming...
When farmer John Durfee found the body of a local factory girl hanging from a fence post on his property on the morning of December 21, 1832, he and the rest of the townspeople assumed she had died by suicide. But a cryptic n...
Over the course of just one year in the early 1840s, Thomas Smallwood, a recently emancipated Black man, with the assistance of the New England educated white abolitionist Charles Torrey, arranged for around 400 enslaved peop...
In 1894, Mary P. Evans, wrote in the Woman’s Era , a Black women’s magazine, that exercise: “enables you to keep in the best condition for work with the hands or with the brain… It prepares you to meet disappointment, sorrow,...
In the American colonies and then in the antebellum United States, the legal system reinforced the power and authority of slaveholders by allowing them to physically abuse the people they enslaved while severely punishing ens...
When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men were endowed with the rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” he did not have in mind the rights of the hundreds of human beings he e...
As soon as the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, free Black men in the North rushed to enlist, but they were turned away, as President Lincoln worried that arming Black soldiers would lead to secession b...
In 1848, a group of religious perfectionists, led by John Humphrey Noyes, established a commune in Oneida, New York, where they lived and worked together. Women in the community had certain freedoms compared to the outside wo...
Despite a plea from Abigail Adams to her husband to “Remember the Ladies,” women, especially married women, didn’t have many legal rights in the Early Republic. Even so, women used existing legal structures to advocate for th...
During the 19th Century, growing international trade and imperialist conquest combined with new technologies to transport and care for flora led to a burgeoning fascination with plant life. American writers, from Emily Dickin...
In 19th Century New York, everyone knew who to go to to end an unwanted pregnancy: the French-trained, sophisticated Madame Restell, who lived in a posh mansion on 5th Avenue. In reality, Madame Restell was English immigrant ...
By 1833, Lydia Maria Child was a popular author, having published both fiction and nonfiction, including the wildly successful advice book The Frugal Housewife: Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of Economy. And she had b...
If you’ve ever lived in Chicago, you’ve probably heard at some point that Chicago has the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw. While that’s an exaggeration it’s certainly the case that the Chicagoland region has a lar...
The first Cook County Jail was a wooden stockade, built in 1833 in Chicago, which was then a town of around 250 people. Today, the Cook County Department of Corrections, which takes up 8 city blocks on the Southwest Side of C...
The second half of the nineteenth century was a momentous time in Italian history, marked by the unification of the peninsula and the formation of the Kingdom of Italy. Three American women writers had a front-seat view of th...
