In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the last slave ship landed in the United States from Africa. The transatlantic slave trade had been illegal in the US since 1808, but Alabama enslaver Timothy Meaher and his friends were so sure they could get away with it that…
In 1830, amid the Second Great Awakening in the burned-over district of New York State, Joseph Smith, Jr., and Oliver Cowdery ordained each other as the first two elders in what they then called the Church of Christ. Within eight years, the Governor of Missouri issued an executive order that…
Almost as soon as there were radio stations, there were college radio stations. In 1948, to popularize FM radio, the FCC introduced class D non commercial education licenses for low-watt college radio stations. By 1967, 326 FM radio signals in the United States operated as “educational radio,” 220 of which…
What makes a Christmas movie a Christmas movie? How do Christmas movies react to – and help us heal from – collective trauma? How can a British Christmas movie feel quintessentially American? We discuss all that and more this week at the 20th Anniversary of Love Actually, with G. Vaughn…
Stories of the Civil Rights Movement don’t often center the fundraisers, often Black women, whose tireless efforts made the movement possible; today we’re featuring one of those women. Mollie Moon, born in 1907, the founder and first chairperson of the National Council of Urban League Guilds, raised millions of dollars…
In the ravages of post-World War II Europe, some Jewish women survivors of the Holocaust found the beginnings of a new life when they met – and married – American (and Canadian and British) men serving with the Allied forces. These women were part of a much larger group of…
Scholar Merze Tate, born in Michigan in 1905, overcame the odds in what she called a “sex and race discriminating world,” to earn graduate degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University on her way to becoming the first Black woman to teach in the History Department at Howard University. During…
The beginning of the Civil Rights Movement is often dated to sometime in the middle of the 1950s, but the roots of it stretch back much further. The NAACP, which calls itself “the nation's largest and most widely recognized civil rights organization,” was founded near the beginning of the 20th…
When Europeans arrived in the Great Lakes region, they learned from the Indigenous people living there of a route from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, made possible by a portage connecting the Chicago River and the Des Plaines River. That portage, sometimes called Mud Lake, provided both opportunity and…
Before Europeans landed in North America, five Indigenous nations around what would become New York State came together to form the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. When the Europeans arrived, the French called them the Iroquois Confederacy, and the English called them the League of Five Nations. Those Five Nations were the Mohawks,…
In 1945, the population of the United States was around 140 million people, and those Americans owned an estimated 45 million guns, or about one gun for every three people. By 2023, the population of the United States stood at just over 330 million people, and according to historical data…
If you go to a grocery store in the United States and pick up a box of cereal, you expect to find a white box on the back of the package with information in Helvetica Black about the food’s macronutrients (things like fat and protein) and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals).…
During the 19th Century, the Northern Cheyenne people made a number of treaties with the United States government, but the U.S. repeatedly failed to honor its end of the treaties. In November 1876, the U.S. Army, still fuming over their crushing defeat by the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne at the…
In 1950, President Harry Truman ordered US troops to the Korean peninsula to help the South Koreans repel the invading North Korean People’s Army, which was supported by the communist regimes of the Soviet Union and China. One of the regiments shipped overseas to fight was the 65th Infantry Regiment,…
In the late 1960s, as college campuses became hotbeds of liberal protest, conservative college groups, like the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (ISI), the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), and College Republicans, backed by powerful conservative elders and their deep pockets, fought back, staging counter protests, publishing conservative newspapers, taking over…
At the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women, a group of women, led by writer Betty Friedan and organizer and attorney Pauli Murray, decided that to make progress they needed to form an independent national civil rights organization for women. Within months, the National Organization for…
When farmer John Durfee found the body of a local factory girl hanging from a fence post on his property on the morning of December 21, 1832, he and the rest of the townspeople assumed she had died by suicide. But a cryptic note she had left among her possessions…
Just days after British troops captured New York City from General Washington and his army in September 1776, fire broke out, destroying a fifth of the city. The British blamed rebels who had remained hidden in Manhattan, but Washington, who had been ordered by Congress to leave the city standing…
RuPaul’s Drag Race first aired on TV in 2009, but the New York City drag scene that launched RuPaul started over a century earlier. From drag balls to Wigstock, New York has long been considered the capital of drag culture. Joining me in this episode to discuss New York City’s…
Over the course of just one year in the early 1840s, Thomas Smallwood, a recently emancipated Black man, with the assistance of the New England educated white abolitionist Charles Torrey, arranged for around 400 enslaved people to escape the Baltimore and DC area for freedom in Canada. While the abolition…
One of the best known poets of Revolutionary New England was an enslaved Black girl named Phillis Wheatley, who was only emancipated after she published a book of 39 of her poems in London. Wheatley, who met with Benjamin Franklin and corresponded with George Washington, was the first person of…
One of the biggest stars in Prohibition Age New York was blues singer Gladys Bentley, who caused a stir in Harlem, wearing a top hat and tails, flirting with women in the audience, and singing raunchy lyrics. Despite Bentley’s phenomenal talent, the repeal of Prohibition and the end of the…
As a child in Los Angeles, Wong Liu Tsong knew she wanted to be an actress. Adopting the screen name Anna May Wong and dropping out of school to pursue her passion, Wong landed her first lead role at age 17. Despite Hollywood racism that would limit the types of…
When Anna Rosenberg Hoffman died in 1983, the New York Times called her “one of the most influential women in the country's public affairs for a quarter of a century.” A skilled labor mediator and advisor to four U.S. presidents, Rosenberg, a Jewish immigrant from Hungary, stood up to Senator…
