In the early 20th century, career options for Black workers were limited, and the jobs often came with low pay and poor conditions. Ironically, because they were concentrated in certain jobs, Black workers sometimes monopoli...
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...
Sometime in the mid-1780s, Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a Black man from Saint-Domingue, and his Potawatomi wife, Kitihawa, settled with their family on a swampy site near Lake Michigan called Eschecagou, “land of the wild o...
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...
In September 1970, commandos from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked five planes, landing three of them near Zarqua, Jordan, at a remote desert airstrip called Dawson’s Field, which the commando...
Over 350,000 African American men joined the United States military during World War I, serving valiantly despite discrimination and slander. Historian and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois had hoped that their patriotis...
During World War II, over 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of whom were US citizens, were forcibly removed from their homes in California, Washington, and Oregon, and imprisoned in relocation centers, small towns surrounded b...
In September 1969, African American journalist Wallace Terry reported on “another war being fought in Vietnam — between black and white Americans.” After the 1948 integration of the military, the U.S. Army had tried to be col...
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...
In the 1980s undocumented Irish immigrants convinced United States lawmakers to create a program that would provide a path to citizenship for individuals without family connections in the United States. That program eventuall...
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...
In 1963, on the heels of a failed desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia, Martin Luther King., Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference decided to take a stand for Civil Rights in “the Most Segregated City in ...
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...
While voters were casting their ballots in the 1972 presidential election, Native demonstrators had taken over the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, DC, barricading themselves in with office furniture and prepa...
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...
In 1983, Harold Washington took on the Chicago machine and won, with the help of a multiracial coalition, becoming the first Black mayor of Chicago. Winning the mayoral election was only the first fight, and 29 of the 50 alde...
On February 29, 1968, Lady Bird Johnson hosted the first–and last–White House Fashion Show. The fashion show, intended both to highlight the fourth largest industry in the United States and to promote domestic tourism, inadve...
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 ...
In her 2015 book, Gloria Steinem described the National Women’s Conference of 1977 as “the most important event nobody knows about.” The four-day event in Houston, Texas, which brought together 2,000 delegates and another 15,...
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...
On the morning of July 24, 1915, employees of the Western Electric Company and their families excitedly boarded the SS Eastland near the Clark Street Bridge in Chicago, eager to set off for a day of fun in Michigan City, Indi...
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...
