Season 1
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…
Women in the U.S. Military during the Cold War
Oct. 4, 2021
Nearly 350,000 American women served in the US military during World War II. Although the women in the military didn’t engage in combat their presence was vital to the American effort, in clerical work as well as in driving …
Freedom Suits in Maryland & DC, 1790-1864
Sept. 27, 2021
Slavery was legal in Maryland until November 1, 1864, when a new state constitution prohibited the practice of slavery. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation the year before had declared slaves in the Confederate states to be …
Chef Lena Richard
Sept. 20, 2021
Over a decade before Julia Child’s The French Chef appeared on TV, a Black woman chef hosted her own, very popular cooking show on WDSU-TV in New Orleans. At a time when families were just beginning to own televisions, Chef …
African American AIDS Activism
Sept. 13, 2021
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), in 2018, 13% of the US population was Black and African American, but 42% of new HIV diagnoses in the US were from Black and African American people. Thi…
The Coors Boycott
Sept. 6, 2021
In the mid-1960s, to protest discriminatory hiring practices, Chicano groups in Colorado called for a boycott of the Coors Brewing Company, launching what would become a decades-long boycott that brought together a coalition…
Phrenology & Crime in 19th Century America
Aug. 30, 2021
In Nineteenth Century America there was a strong reformist push to know and improve the self. One key tactic Americans used to learn more about themselves was phrenological readings. They would pay practical phrenologists, l…
Chesapeake Bay Pirates & the 19th Century Oyster Wars
Aug. 23, 2021
In Chesapeake Bay in the late 19th century, oyster harvesting was a big business. There were so many oyster harvesters harvesting so many oysters that the legislatures of Maryland and Virginia had to start regulating who cou…
Prohibition in the 1850s
Aug. 16, 2021
Popular depictions of prohibition in the United States usually show the speakeasies, bootleggers, flappers, and bathtub gin of the Roaring Twenties, but earlier attempts at prohibition stretch back far into the 19th century.…
The Nativist Riots of Philadelphia in 1844
Aug. 9, 2021
In May of 1844, growing tensions between nativists and Irish Catholic immigrants in Philadelphia erupted into violence in the streets of the Irish Catholic Kensington district, prompted in part by a disagreement over whether…
Elizabeth Packard
Aug. 2, 2021
Elizabeth Packard was born in Massachusetts in 1816 into a comfortable home where her parents were able to provide for her education. She taught briefly at a girls’ school before at age 23 agreeing at her parents’ urging to …
Mary Mallon (The Sad & Complicated Story of "Typhoid Mary")
July 26, 2021
Mary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, immigrated from Northern Ireland to New York City at age 15, around 1883. She found work as a cook, a well paying job for an immigrant woman and worked for number of different f…
Migrant Incarceration and the 1985 El Centro Hunger Strike
July 19, 2021
In 1945, United States immigration officials opened the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp in El Centro, California, to be an administrative holding center for unauthorized Mexican migrants, many of whom had been working o…
Black Teachers & The Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina
July 12, 2021
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas that that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Although the process was slow and conten…
Homosexuality and the Left Before 1960
July 5, 2021
Political activism of queer people in the United States started long before the Stonewall riots in 1969. One surprising place that queer people found a home for their activism was in the Communist Party. The Communist Party …
Sophonisba Breckinridge
June 28, 2021
Sophonisba “Nisba” Preston Breckinridge, born April 1, 1866, was a woman of firsts. Breckinridge was the first woman admitted to the Kentucky bar to practice law in 1895; the first woman to earn a PhD in Political Science at…
Susie King Taylor
June 21, 2021
Susie King Taylor was born into slavery in Georgia in 1848. With the help of family members, she was educated and escaped, joining the Union army at the age of 14, to serve ostensibly as a laundress, but in reality as a nurs…
The Jackson State Shootings in May 1970
June 14, 2021
Just after midnight on May 15, 1970, officers opened fire on a group of unarmed students milling in front of a dorm on the campus of Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, killing two and wounding twelve. Although th…
Knitting Brigades of World War I
June 7, 2021
Between America’s entry into World War I and the end of the war less than two years later, Americans knit 23 million articles of clothing and bandages for soldiers overseas, directed by the American Red Cross. How was this k…
Introducing Unsung History
June 3, 2021
A podcast about the people and events in American history you may not know much about. Yet. With host Kelly Therese Pollock. In each episode of Unsung History I’ll start us out with a short narrative answering the Who, What,…