Unsung History

In the fall of 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House on Chicago’s Near West Side, full of good intentions to help the poor people of the neighborhood. They were a force for good, providing education, cultural enrichment, and workforce development, while fighting for protections for women and children. But because of their backgrounds, they also missed important cultural dimensi...

Buddy Bradley, born in the Jim Crow South in 1905, made his way to Harlem at age 16 where he learned to tap dance and became a chorus boy. He was sought out on Broadway as both teacher and choreographer, but never got the credit he deserved, and he moved to London in the 1930s where he had a hugely successful career as a dance director on stage and in film. Although his name isn’t well known today...

During World War II, afraid that major league baseball would need to pause while men were overseas fighting, Philip K. Wrigley, chewing gum mogul and owner of the Chicago Cubs, spearheaded a new professional ball league, this one made up of women players. In the twelve years of All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League play, over 600 women had the chance to play professionally, earning...

The Continental Congress voted to break from Great Britain on July 2, 1776, and approved the text of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, but it took weeks for the news to spread throughout the new country and even longer to reach the country they were breaking from and the countries with whom they hoped to find alliances. Along the way, people learned the news from printed broadsides, newsp...

The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building loom large in the American imagination, symbolizing the conflicting ideas of liberty and empire; their meanings and characters have shifted over time as the American ethos has shifted. Joining me in this episode is writer, historian, and freelance editor, Dr. Vaneesa Cook , author of Empire and Liberty: The Tied Histories of Two American Landmark...

Today the US handbag market is estimated to be nearly $12 billion, with most of the purchasing done by women, but into the early 20th Century purses hadn’t yet become the nearly-exclusive domain of women. The integration of pockets into men’s clothing, and the marketing push of toiletry items to women in the 1920s and 1930s drove this differentiated market  development. Joining me in this episode...

On the morning of Tuesday, October 6, 1964, the Lady Bird Special , a 19-car train carrying First Lady Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, her supporters, members of the press, and a security detail, departed Union Station in Washington, DC, for an ambitious 1,682-mile whistle-stop campaign tour of Southern States. In four days, Lady Bird gave 47 speeches to over 200,000 people, demonstrating that despit...

Enslaved Africans were forcibly shipped to Virginia starting in 1619 in response to a severe labor shortage. From the beginning, enslaved laborers resisted by fleeing and through violence, and white enslavers reacted by creating a racialized system of brutal policing, granting themselves authority based on skin color and a sense of superiority. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Gautham Rao , Assoc...

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner advanced his now-famous Frontier Theory, arguing that the American identity was forged through the process of exploring and adapting to new environments in the frontier west. Key to both Turner’s theory and the myth of the frontier that pre-dated it was the idea that brave white American men conquered a previously empty land through their grit in a relen...

In the Weimar Republic, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science and advocated for the repeal of legislation that criminalized sexual relations between men. At the Institute, pioneering gender-affirming surgeries were performed, and it was there that Dora Richter became the first known trans woman to undergo comprehensive male-to-female gender-affirming surgeries. But when the...

For 74 days in 1810 the current-day parishes of East and West Feliciana in New Orleans were part of the independent Republic of West Florida, which flew a lone star flag. By that point the residents of the Felicianas, including a large enslaved population, living on land that had been stolen from indigenous people, had been part of three different empires. The republic ended with the parishes anne...

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was formed in 1927 one of the goals of the founders was to recognize achievements in the industry. That recognition quickly took the form of annual awards banquets, with the first one hosted in 1929. Over time the format shifted from banquet to the Oscars telecast we all know today, as the categories and even membership of the Academy adapted to...

George Washington privately condemned slavery while actively holding hundreds of people in enslavement. He championed gradual emancipation plans while scheming to keep the people he enslaved from accessing them. He ruthlessly pursued a woman who escaped his enslavement and then emancipated the slaves he owned outright in his will. Washington’s complicated and contradictory legacy around slavery ha...

One hundred years ago, Dr. Carter G. Woodson created and launched the inaugural Negro History Week after his professors told him that Black people didn’t have a history worth studying. Negro History Week built on the success of Douglass Day and quickly spread through Black communities in the United States. Fifty years later, at the urging of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and...

Reed Peggram, born in Boston in 1914, a gay Black man in a world that put up barriers to his success, excelled at Harvard before heading to a Europe on the brink of war. In Europe he fell in love with a Danist artist, and despite pleas from everyone in his life and from the US government to leave the war-torn continent, Reed refused to depart without Arne, leading to his imprisonment in an Italian...

Charles C. Diggs, Jr., founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, spent 25 years in Congress, pushing for change, on issues from segregation in commercial aviation to home-rule for the residents of Washington, DC, to the anti-apartheid movement. His legislative accomplishments were overshadowed by his downfall, and today his story doesn’t receive the attention of other Civil Rights heroes. Joining...

When All in the Family premiered in January 1971, CBS was nervous enough about the content that they added an advisory message at the beginning. Despite their fears, the show was a success, quickly garnering both awards and top Nielsen ratings. All in the Family not only changed television in the United States but also the practice of politics. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Oscar Winberg , Pos...

When It’s a Wonderful Life was first released, it wasn’t a box office hit, but it did draw the attention of the FBI and its investigation into the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry (COMPIC). The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) didn’t end up doing anything with the FBI’s allegations of subversion in the film, but the pressure of investigations like this led to a sh...

Americans love their coffee; according to the Fall 2025 National Coffee Data Trends Report, 66% of adult Americans drink coffee every day, averaging three cups per day. This devotion to the caffeinated beverage is nothing new. Even before Bostonians dumped over 90,000 pounds of tea in the harbor, Americans were sipping cups of joe. George and Martha Washington served tea at the President’s House i...

Global rum sales are expected to reach nearly $28 billion USD by the year 2033, making it one of the ten most popular alcoholic beverages in the world. In this episode we look at the early history of rum, how its invention and production were intertwined with the transatlantic slave trade, and how abolitionists tried to find free-labor sources of the popular liquor. Joining me in this episode is D...

New Orleans is known for its unique cuisine that blends and highlights the many cultural roots of the city and its residents. The history of food distribution in New Orleans is just as unique within the American landscape, relying heavily on public food systems, both street vendors and municipally-run public markets. Joining me in this episode is Dr. Ashley Rose Young , a curator and public histor...

In 1912, wealthy Savannahian Juliette Gordon Low supposedly called her cousin and exclaimed: “Come right over! I’ve got something for the girls of Savannah, for all of America, and for the world.” That something would become the Girl Scouts of the USA, an organization that throughout its history struggled to fulfill its initial promise of inclusion for all girls while trying to maintain an apoliti...

Zoe Anderson Norris, known to her friends in the Ragged Edge Klub as the Queen of Bohemia, was born in Kentucky in 1860, moved to Wichita, Kansas, with her first husband, and then to New York City, where she forged a career for herself as a journalist and novelist, eventually launching her own magazine, The East Side. In The East Side and in her journalism, she often focused on the lives of immigr...

Dr. Marguerite Phillips Dorsey Cartwright, born May 17, 1910, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a journalist, sociologist, educator, and actress, who served as a correspondent for the United Nations, attended and wrote about both the Bandung Conference and the All-African People's Conference, and was appointed to the Provisional Council of the University of Nigeria, where she became one of five...

The feminist anti-rape movement began in the late 1960s at the height of women’s liberation. As rape crisis centers relied on federal grants aimed at prosecution of those committing sexual violence, feminists worried about the conservatizing influence of those funds, and Black women in particular were not well-served by the developing model. Black women activists found their own methods to combat...