Season 1
The Pacific Coast Abortion Ring
Sept. 26, 2022
In mid-1930s, pregnant women in cities in California, Oregon, and Washington could obtain safe surgical abortions in clean facilities from professionals trained in the latest technique. The only catch? The abortions were ill…
Mary Ware Dennett & the Birth Control Movement
Sept. 19, 2022
For birth control advocate Mary Ware Dennett, the personal was political. After a difficult labor and delivery with her third child, a physician told Mary Ware Dennett she should not have any more children, but he told her n…
Abortion in 18th Century New England
Sept. 12, 2022
In 1742, in Pomfret, Connecticut, 19-year-old Sarah Grosvenor discovered she was pregnant, the result of a liaison with 27-year-old Amasa Sessions. Instead of marrying Sarah, Amasa provided her with a physician-prescribed ab…
Agatha Christie
Sept. 5, 2022
Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, whose books have been outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. You can probably name several of her books and recurring characters, but how much do you know about A…
Mary Seacole
Aug. 29, 2022
When the United Kingdom joined forces with Turkey and France to declare war on Russia in March 1854, Jamaican-Scottish nurse Mary Seacole decided her help was needed. When the British War Office declined her repeated offers …
Henrietta Maria
Aug. 22, 2022
Henrietta Maria, the French Catholic wife of King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 17th Century, was called a “Popish brat of France” by her British subjects, blamed for the English Civil War, and seen as a…
Anne Bonny & Mary Read, Pirate Queens
Aug. 15, 2022
During the Golden Age of Pirates, two fierce and ruthless pirates stood apart from the rest, despite their brief careers. The only women in their crew, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were aggressive fighters to the end, refusing t…
The Women who Programmed the ENIAC
Aug. 8, 2022
During World War II, the United States Army contracted with a group of engineers at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering to build the ENIAC, the world’s first programmable general-purpose ele…
Filipino Nurses in the United States
Aug. 1, 2022
A February 2021 report by National Nurses United found that while Filipinos make up 4% of RNs in the United States, they accounted for a stunning 26.4% of the registered nurses who had died of COVID-19 and related complicati…
The Townsend Family Legacy
July 25, 2022
When Alabama plantation owner Samuel Townsend died in 1856, he willed his vast fortune to his children and his nieces. What seems like an ordinary bequest was anything but, since Townsend’s children and nieces were his ensla…
The Unusual Codicil in Benjamin Franklin's Will
July 18, 2022
When Benjamin Franklin died in April 1790, his last will contained an unusual codicil, leaving 1000 pounds sterling each to Philadelphia and Boston, to be used in a very specific way that he hoped would both help tradesmen i…
Dale Evans, Queen of the West
July 11, 2022
Dale Evans is probably best known as the Queen of the West, the wife and co-star of the King of Cowboys, Roy Rogers. But before she ever met Roy, Dale had a successful career in singing, songwriting, and acting, and she had …
Independence Day
July 4, 2022
On July 4, Americans will eat 150 million hot dogs, spend $1 billion on beer, and watch 16,000 fireworks displays (and those are just the official ones). But why do we celebrate on July 4, when did it become a national holid…
The 1966 Compton's Cafeteria Riot
June 27, 2022
On a hot weekend night in August 1966 trans women fought back against police harassment at Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. Although the Compton’s riot didn’t spark a national movement the way…
Two-Spirit People in Native American Cultures
June 20, 2022
In the summer of 1990, at the third annual Native American/First Nations gay and lesbian conference, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the term Two Spirit was established. An English translation of the Northern Algonquin term niizh man…
The Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village
June 13, 2022
The 12-story Women’s House of Detention, situated in the heart of Greenwich Village in New York City, from 1932 to 1974, was central to the queer history of The Village. The House of D, as it was known, housed such inmates a…
The Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement
June 6, 2022
Queer suffragists were central to the women’s suffrage movement in the United States from its earliest days. However, in a movement that placed great importance on public image in service of the goal of achieving the vote, q…
Chinese Grocery Stores in the Mississippi Delta
May 30, 2022
During Reconstruction, cotton planters in the Mississippi Delta recruited Chinese laborers to work on their plantations, to replace the emancipated slaves who had previously done the hard labor. However, the Chinese workers …
Patsy Mink
May 23, 2022
In Patsy Mink’s first term in Congress in 1965, she was one of only 11 women serving in the US House of Representatives, and she was the first woman of color to ever serve in Congress. Mink was no stranger to firsts, being t…
The US-Born Japanese Americans (Nisei) who Migrated to Japan
May 16, 2022
In the decades before World War II, 50,000 of the US-born children of Japanese immigrants (a quarter of their total population) migrated from the United States to the Japanese Empire. Although these second generation Japanes…
Thai Americans & the Rise of Thai Food in the United States
May 9, 2022
There are around 300,000 Thai Americans but almost 5,000 Thai restaurants in the United States. To understand how Thai restaurants became so ubiquitous in the US, we dive into the history of how Thai cuisine arrived in the U…
Mary Paik Lee
May 2, 2022
Mary Paik Lee (Paik Kuang Sun) was born in the Korean Empire on August 17, 1900, and was baptized by American Presbyterian minister Dr. Samuel Austin Moffett, one of the first American Presbyterian missionaries to come to Ko…
French Fashion in Gilded Age America
April 25, 2022
Paris has a long history as the fashion capital of the world. In the late 19th Century, American women, like European women, wanted the latest in French fashion. The wealthiest women traveled to Paris regularly to visit thei…
The Cabinet
April 18, 2022
Today, when Americans think of it at all, they take for granted the institution of The Cabinet, the heads of the executive departments and other advisors who meet with the President around a big mahogany table in the White H…
The Abolition Movement of the 1830s
April 11, 2022
From the founding of the United States, there were people who opposed slavery, but many who grappled with the concept, including slave owner Thomas Jefferson, envisioned a plan of gradual emancipation for the country. In 181…
The 1913 Ascent of Denali
April 4, 2022
In June 1913, a group of four men ascended to the peak of Denali, the first humans known to have reached the highest point in North America. In a time before ultra lightweight and high-tech equipment, Hudson Stuck, Harry Kar…
Cordelia Dodson Hood
March 28, 2022
When German troops invaded Austria in 1938, Cordelia Dodson was visiting Vienna, living with her siblings as they studied German, attended the opera, and marched with Austrian students protesting against Hitler. Even with th…
The National Women's Football League
March 21, 2022
In 1967, a Cleveland talent agent named Sid Friedman decided to capitalize on the popularity of football in the rust belt by launching a women’s football league, which he envisioned as entertainment, complete with mini-skirt…
Babe Didrikson Zaharias
March 14, 2022
Born in 1911, Mildred Ella Didrikson Zaharias, who went by the nickname “Babe,” was a phenomenal, and confident athlete. Babe won Olympic gold in track and field, was an All American player in basketball, pitched in exhibiti…
Yellowstone National Park
March 7, 2022
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 re…
Freedpeople in Indian Territory
Feb. 28, 2022
When the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee (or Creek), and Seminole Nations – known as “The Five Civilized Tribes” by white settlers – were forcibly moved from their lands in the Southeastern United States to Indian Ter…
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Feb. 21, 2022
Poet, essayist, and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson is perhaps best known as the widow of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, but she is a remarkable figure in her own right. Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who had only recently…
The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion
Feb. 14, 2022
On February 14, 1945, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean and surviving a run-in with a Nazi U-Boat, the women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion disembarked the Île-de-France in Glasgow, Scotland. The task await…
Julia Chinn
Feb. 7, 2022
Julia Chinn was born into slavery in Kentucky at the tail end of the 18th Century. Despite laws against interracial marriage, Richard Mentor Johnson, the ninth Vice President of the United States, called Julia Chinn his wife…
Who was Carol Lane?
Jan. 31, 2022
In fall 1947 the Shell Oil Company hired a Women’s Travel Director named Carol Lane, who served in the role until she retired in 1974. Lane’s job was to encourage women to travel, showing them the joys of touring the country…
The Amerikadeutscher Volksbund & the Newark Minutemen in the 1930s
Jan. 24, 2022
The rise of Nazism before World War II wasn’t limited to Germany. The German-Americna Bund ( Amerikadeutscher Volksbund ) formed in Buffalo, New York, in 1936, to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany. It quickly grew to …
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
Jan. 17, 2022
Mary Ann Shadd Cary, born in Delaware in 1823, was a teacher, a writer, an abolitionist, a suffragist, and a lawyer, and is considered to be the first Black woman to publish and edit a newspaper in North America, The Provinc…
The 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike
Jan. 10, 2022
In February, 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, a small group of unionized workers at the Electric Auto-Lite company of Toledo, Ohio, went on strike. When management failed to sign a promised contract by the April 1…
The Suffrage Road Trip of 1915
Jan. 3, 2022
In September 1915, four suffragists set off from the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California, in a brand-new Overland 6 convertible to make the 3,000-mile drive across the country to deliver a pe…
Women-Led Slave Revolts
Dec. 27, 2021
Enslaved Africans in what is now New York State and in the Middle Passage resisted their enslavement, despite the risk of doing so. In the previously accepted history of these slave revolts, the assumption was that men led t…
The Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II
Dec. 20, 2021
From September 1942 to December 1944, over 1000 American women served in the war effort as Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), flying 80% of all ferrying missions and delivering 12,652 aircraft of 78 types. They also trans…
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee
Dec. 13, 2021
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was born in China in 1896 but lived most of her life in the United States, where, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, she had no path to naturalization until the law changed in 1943. Even though it would not…
Loïs Mailou Jones
Dec. 6, 2021
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1905, artist Loïs Mailou Jones’s career spanned much of the 20th Century as both a painter and a teacher of generations of Black artists at Howard University. Jones faced racial discriminati…
The Yakama War
Nov. 29, 2021
In October 1805, the Yakama encountered the Lewis and Clark Expedition near the confluence of the Yakima and Columbia rivers. By fifty years later, so many European and American trappers, traders, and eventually, settlers, h…
The Wampanoag & the Thanksgiving Myth
Nov. 22, 2021
In Autumn of 1621, a group of Pilgrims from the Mayflower voyage and Wampanoag men, led by their sachem Massasoit, ate a feast together. The existence of that meal, which held little importance to either the Pilgrims or the …
Treaty Rights of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe
Nov. 15, 2021
Before the arrival of Europeans, the Ojibwe nation occupied much of the Lake Superior region, including what is now Ontario in Canada and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in the United States. In 1850, President Zachary Ta…
Alaska Territorial Guard in World War II
Nov. 8, 2021
Prior to World War II, most of the US military deemed the territory of Alaska as militarily unimportant, to the point where the Alaska National Guard units were stationed instead in Washington state in August of 1941. That c…
The Stockbridge-Munsee Community & their Removal History
Nov. 1, 2021
The Stockbridge-Munsee Community , the People of the Waters that Are Never Still, were forced to move many times after they first encountered Europeans. In 1609, Dutch trader Henry Hudson sailed up the Mahicannituck, the Riv…
Fashion, Feminism, and the New Woman of the late 19th Century
Oct. 25, 2021
The late 19th Century ushered in an evolution in women’s fashion from the Victorian “True Woman” whose femininity was displayed in wide skirts and petticoats, the “New Woman” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was mod…
The Original Fight for the Equal Rights Amendment
Oct. 18, 2021
After the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, enfranchising (some) women, lots of questions remained. If women could vote, could they serve on juries? Could they hold public office? What about the array of state-laws that s…