Much as been made of the Underground Railroad, the overland network of paths that headed north and was utilized by escaping slaves for decades. But many don’t realize there were other paths to freedom. One of these was the so-called Saltwater Railroad, which ran south into Florida, following the coastal waterway. Recall that Florida was
As a history nerd, one of my recurring interests is the parts of history that never make it into textbooks. You’ve probably heard of the Black women mathematicians who helped win the space race, as documented in the excellent book and movie Hidden Figures. Recently I found a story that is both similar in content
Look through historical photos of groups and events, and you see a uniform similarity. There are a lot of men, usually of the same race. But every once in a while, a woman is somewhere in the frame. Sometimes they are unidentified. But we know one thing for sure — they were all trailblazers. Someone
Every student learns about how escaping slaves received assistance while fleeing north, to the point where this informal system became known as the “Underground Railroad”; anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 fugitives ran to the north this way. But what is recently coming to light is how approximately 3,000 to 10,000 also escaped south to Mexico
People simply don’t like change. When I was in the publishing business, the company I had just joined had the opportunity to expand. There was a casket-supply company close by whose business was (if you’ll pardon the expression) dying, so we had a chance to move into their location. Yet some neighbors were very vocally
“Don’t trust the maps” was good advice for much of human history. The book The Un-Discovered Islands: An Archipelago of Myths and Mysteries, Phantoms and Fakes by Malachy Tallack, illustrated by Katie Scott, makes this point vividly by revealing the stories behind lands that weren’t really there. For example, the 1783 Treaty of Paris that
When you studied slavery and the slave trade in school, how many rebellions were you taught? On Thursday of this week, I was helping out in middle school social studies, and I learned something that just wasn’t mentioned when I was in school. In 1839, there was a successful rebellion aboard the slave ship Amistad.
March 22nd is the anniversary of an event that helped shaped the United States but has largely been forgotten. On March 22, 1622 Native Americans of the tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy attacked settlements of the Virginia Colony. This was actually the second of three Powhatan Wars, and was triggered by colonists taking more land from the Confederacy,
Considering your own marriage or relationship, how much influence does your spouse/significant other have over your professional life? With that in mind, have you ever wondered how much impact a wife has had on a famous historic figure? Occasionally, such an example comes to light. It’s been established that Woodrow Wilson’s second wife Edith played
History has recorded many daring escapes of slaves from the pre-Civil War South. But none was more daring than that of Ellen Craft and her husband William. Born in 1826 in Clinton, Georgia, Ellen’s father was actually her first enslaver, Col. James Smith. Ellen was so light-skinned she was frequently mistaken for one of his
