“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
Many slaveholders, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, knew slavery was wrong, they just didn’t know how to move beyond it. As Jefferson wrote in 1820, “As it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in
It’s remarkable how selective our memories can be when it comes to history. In school, I never learned about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre (https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/). Like most of the rest of the country, I heard about it only recently. So it stands to reason that I would never have been taught about the 1844 riots
Occasionally you see something that causes you to sit up and take notice. Today (August 3, 2021) the Army’s Fort Benning, GA is dedicating a memorial to the memory of Felix Hall. A war hero? Sort of. Felix Hall was a 19-year-old soldier who was lynched on the fort’s grounds. He was an African-American who
It is not my intention to rehash the controversy surrounding military installations named for Confederate leaders. But a recent article on Time magazine’s daily email The Brief got my attention. It seems there is a surprising imbalance in who we are choosing to honor in our base naming. According to the article, there are almost
If you think the current political period is divisive, consider the era following the Civil War. It was a time when some thought our very democracy was broken. The trauma of war was followed by economic and technological disruption, and many turned to extreme partisanship. The result was an increased voter turnout in the closest,
