Her hat gives her away. At first glance, this seems like a typical group photo of a University of Missouri School of Medicine class in 1897. Then you realize there is a woman in the picture. Although the caption identified her as the “class secretary,” she is actually Anna Searcy, an orphan who was sent
It’s easy to be familiar with history’s great speeches, like President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. But have you ever thought about speeches that were written and, for whatever reason, never delivered? Jeff Nussbaum has. As a speechwriter himself, he has researched and authored Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History. His underlying principle
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,
