Isabel Truesdell Kelly earned her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932, with a dissertation on the “Fundamentals of Great Basin Culture,” having researched the Northern Paiute and Coast Miwok Indigenous cultures of Northern California. After graduating she led excavations in Mexico and then began a…
At the end of August 1787, after three long months of debate and deliberation, the Constitutional Convention had neared the end of its work. They were poised at that time to write into the Constitution that the President of the United States would be elected by the legislature, but at…
In the 1870s, 120 Chinese boys came to New England as part of the Chinese Educational Mission. The boys studied at prep schools and colleges, and while they continued their lessons in Chinese language and culture, they also learned about the culture of their adopted homeland, including the local sports,…
Shortly after he was born in 1971, Ryan White was diagnosed with severe hemophilia. Ryan was able to reduce his hospitalizations from the disease through the use of in-home injections of Factor VIII concentrate, something he and other people with hemophilia saw as a lifeline. The downside of this lifeline…
When she was just fifteen years old, in 1830, Sarah Martha Sanders was sold to Richard Walpole Cogdell of Charleston, South Carolina. Within a year she was pregnant with his child, and just after she turned 17, Sarah Martha gave birth to Robert Sanders, the first of nine children she…
At the dedication for a school for African American students in Manassas, Virginia, in 1894, Frederick Douglass said: “no greater benefit can be bestowed upon a long benighted people, than giving to them, as we are here earnestly this day endeavoring to do, the means of an education.” In the…
In his bestselling childcare manual American pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock advised new moms:“If you begin to feel at all depressed, go to a movie, or to the beauty parlor, or to get yourself a new hat or dress.” Although puerperal insanity had been a recognized diagnosis at the end of…
Between 1921 and 1948, every Southern and border state, except Delaware, set up scholarship programs to send Black students out of state for graduate study rather than admit them to historically white public colleges or build graduate programs in the public HBCUs. While the individual Black students often benefited from…
In 1946, the National Football League began the process of reintegration after a “gentleman’s agreement” had stopped teams from hiring Black players for over a decade. Even as the NFL began to re-integrate, though, racist stereotypes kept teams from drafting Black players into so-called “thinking” positions like quarterback. Black players…
In the Continental Army, one company of patriots in Charleston, South Carolina, was a majority Jewish, and at least fifteen Jewish soldiers in the Army achieved the rank of officer during the American Revolution, something unheard of in European armies at the time. Though their numbers were small (in proportion…
Abigail Smith Adams, wife to the second U.S. president and mother of the sixth U.S. president, may be best known for exhorting her husband to “remember the ladies” as he worked with his colleagues to form a new government, but that was just one of her many strongly-held political views.…
In March 1778, while he was camped at Valley Forge, Commander in Chief George Washington sent a lock of his hair to the daughter of the New Jersey Governor. It wasn’t a romantic gift; rather, Washington was responding to a common request made to celebrities of his time, similar to…
At the Republican National Convention in July 1964, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith’s name was placed in nomination for the presidency, and she received votes from 27 delegates, the first time a woman was placed in nomination at a major party’s presidential convention in the United States. It was only…
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 International Amphitheatre was matched by the huge anti-war protests downtown. While the…
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 Tribune, Schultz, using her command of German and French,…
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 Mermaids. No one could quite figure out what to call it, trying out water…
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 performed near military bases all over the United States and in the Pacific Rim. The Pacific…
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 people, many of them recent Jewish Russian immigrants. As a…
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 Hampton would be known as the affirmative action trustee as she advocated for policies…
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 eyewitnesses saw her fire a pistol on a public streetcar in Utica, New York, killing one man…
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 incarceration that would come to be known as the Auburn…
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 included quilts, sometimes quickly-made utilitarian bedcoverings, but also artistic quilts worthy of exhibition. Quilts…
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 small fraction of the total WPA budget, employed theater professionals; entertained audiences, some…
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 over into a summer of violence. In Washington, DC, 39 people died…
