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 In...
In 1926, American Sigrid Schultz became one of the first women to head a foreign bureau for a US newspaper when she was named the chief correspondent for the Berlin bureau of the Chicago Tribune. In her 26 years with the Trib...
When the 1934 World’s Fair in Chicago was looking for an aquatic act to complement their new underwater lights, organizers turned to physical educator Katherine Curtis, who put together a wildly popular show called the Modern...
In 1971, a group of performers calling themselves the Free Theatre Associates (FTA), including Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, began putting on popular antiwar shows for audiences of active-duty GIs. Over 10 months they per...
In 1912, a group of wealthy and influential German Jews in uptown New York funded an effort to root out organized crime on the lower East Side, then the most densely populated neighborhood on Earth, home to half a million peo...
In 1974, Republican governor Ronald Reagan appointed educator Dr. Claudia Hampton, a Democrat active in her local NAACP, as the first Black woman trustee to the board of California State University. For the next twenty years ...
Josephine McCarty, née Fagan, aka Mrs. Virginia S. Seymour, dba Emma Burleigh. M.D., was many things: mother, teacher, saleswoman, spy, lobbyist, and abortionist. And in 1872 she was also an accused murderer, after eyewitness...
In 1817, the second state prison in New York opened in Auburn, situated on a fast-flowing river so waterpower could be used to run machinery in the factories that would be housed in the prison. In a new practice of incarcerat...
As part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), so-called “unskilled” women were put to work in over 10,000 sewing rooms across the country, producing both garments and home goods for people in need. Those home goods incl...
Between 1935 and 1939, the Federal Theatre Project, part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), employed over 12,000 actors and put on over 1200 productions in 29 states. Led by Hallie Flanagan, the FTP, using only a sma...
In 1919, racial tensions in the US, exacerbated by changes brought about by the first wave of the Great Migration and by the return of Black soldiers who demanded equal citizenship from the country they’d fought for, boiled o...
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...
Fictional depictions of Southern plantations often present romanticized visions of genteel country life, but for the people enslaved on plantations the reality was that of a forced labor camp. At the same time the plantation ...
Shortly after New Orleans became a US city (via the Louisiana Purchase), the municipal council established one of the country’s first professional salaried police forces and began operation of Police Jail, both efforts aimed ...
Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie came of age in a deeply segregated country, battling racism to become celebrated musicians, composers, and band leaders whose music lives on. Joining me this week to discuss th...
In its earliest years, the National League was not segregated, and a few teams included Black ballplayers, but in 1887 major and minor league owners adopted a so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” that no new contracts would be g...
In 1977, a California state senator named John Briggs took to the steps of City Hall in San Francisco to announce a ballot initiative that would empower school boards to fire gay teachers based only on their sexual orientatio...
For several decades in the 20th Century, American universities, including elite institutions, took nude photos of their students, sometimes as often as twice a year, in order to evaluate their posture. In some cases students ...
In the fall of 1983, the LAPD, under Chief of Police Darryl Gates and in collaboration with the LA Unified School District, launched Project DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), sending 10 police officers into 50 elementar...
When Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, his eldest child, 17-year-old Alice, rose quickly to celebrity status. The public loved hearing about the exploits of the poker-playing, gum-chewing “Princess Alice,” who kept...
In August 1943, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt set off in secrecy from San Francisco on a military transport plane, flying across the Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t until she showed up in New Zealand 10 days later that the public lea...
Journalist Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore traveled the world in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, writing books and hundreds of articles about such places as Alaska, Japan, China, India, and helping shape the journal of the Nat...
In 1812, when the United States was still a young nation and its State Department was tiny, American citizens began heading around the world as Christian missionaries. Early in the 19th Century, the US government often saw mi...
In 1931, Judge Samuel Seabury was leading an investigation for Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt into corruption in New York’s magistrate courts when a witness in the investigation named Vivian Gordon was found murdered in the B...
