Unsung History

n October 1805, the Yakama encountered the Lewis and Clark Expedition near the confluence of the Yakima and Columbia rivers. By fifty years later, so many European and American trappers, traders, and eventually, settlers, had arrived in the area, putting demands on the land and resources, that federal government officials called a council meeting with the local tribal nations to negotiate a treaty...

In Autumn of 1621, a group of Pilgrims from the Mayflower voyage and Wampanoag men, led by their sachem Massasoit, ate a feast together. The existence of that meal, which held little importance to either the Pilgrims or the Wampanoag, is the basis of the Thanksgiving myth. The myth, re-told in school Thanksgiving pageants and TV shows, is not accurate and is harmful to Native people, especially to...

Before the arrival of Europeans, the Ojibwe nation occupied much of the Lake Superior region, including what is now Ontario in Canada and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in the United States. In 1850, President Zachary Taylor’s administration, in response to demands from European Americans, planned to force the Ojibwe of Wisconsin west of the Mississippi in violation of signed treaties. They pl...

Prior to World War II, most of the US military deemed the territory of Alaska as militarily unimportant, to the point where the Alaska National Guard units were stationed instead in Washington state in August of 1941. That changed when the Japanese invaded and occupied two Alaskan islands in June of 1942.  The US government responded first by evacuating Unangax̂ villagers and forcibly interning th...

The Stockbridge-Munsee Community , the People of the Waters that Are Never Still, were forced to move many times after they first encountered Europeans. In 1609, Dutch trader Henry Hudson sailed up the Mahicannituck, the River that Flows Both Ways, into Mohican land. By 1614 there was a Dutch trading post established on a nearby island to take advantage of the beaver and otter availability. The ar...

The late 19th Century ushered in an evolution in women’s fashion from the Victorian “True Woman” whose femininity was displayed in wide skirts and petticoats, the “New Woman” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was modern and youthful in a shirtwaist and bell-shaped skirt. Earlier fashion experimentation by feminists in the mid-19th Century had failed to catch on and had interfered with thei...

After the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, enfranchising (some) women, lots of questions remained. If women could vote, could they serve on juries? Could they hold public office? What about the array of state-laws that still privileged husbands and fathers over wives and daughters in regard to property and earnings rights?  In February 1921, Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party decla...

Writer, musician, and political activist Zitkála-Šá, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was born on February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where she lived until she was eight. When Zitkála-Šá was eight years old, missionaries came to the reservation to recruit children to go to White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute. Despite her mother’s pleading, Zitkála-Šá...

Nearly 350,000 American women served in the US military during World War II. Although the women in the military didn’t engage in combat their presence was vital to the American effort, in clerical work as well as in driving trucks, operating radios and telephones, repairing and flying planes, and of course, in nursing. Women’s active duty was a temporary wartime measure, but when the war ended, Se...

Slavery was legal in Maryland until November 1, 1864, when a new state constitution prohibited the practice of slavery. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation the year before had declared slaves in the Confederate states to be free, but Maryland was in the union and not included in the proclamation. From the late 18th Century until the Civil War, enslaved families in Prince George’s County, Maryland,...

Over a decade before Julia Child’s  The French Chef  appeared on TV, a Black woman chef hosted her own, very popular cooking show on WDSU-TV in New Orleans. At a time when families were just beginning to own televisions, Chef Lena Richard’s show was so popular that it aired twice a week. Richard started working as a cook as a teenager for the wealthy Vairin family who employed her mom as a domesti...

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), in 2018, 13% of the US population was Black and African American, but 42% of new HIV diagnoses in the US were from Black and African American people. This discrepancy is not new.  On June 5, 1981, the CDC first published an article in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) titled “Pneumocystis Pneumonia” that suggeste...

In the mid-1960s, to protest discriminatory hiring practices, Chicano groups in Colorado called for a boycott of the Coors Brewing Company, launching what would become a decades-long boycott that brought together a coalition of activists that would include not just Chicano and Latino groups, but also African American groups, union organizers, LGBT activists, students, environmentalists and feminis...

In Nineteenth Century America there was a strong reformist push to know and improve the self. One key tactic Americans used to learn more about themselves was phrenological readings. They would pay practical phrenologists, like Orson Squire Fowler and his younger brother, Lorenzo Niles Fowler for readings of their skulls or their children’s skulls.  In Lorenzo Fowler’s reading of Emily Sawyer, he...

In Chesapeake Bay in the late 19th century, oyster harvesting was a big business. There were so many oyster harvesters harvesting so many oysters that the legislatures of Maryland and Virginia had to start regulating who could harvest oysters and how they could do so. Creating the regulations was the easy part; enforcing them was much harder. The illegal harvesting of oysters by oyster pirates con...

Popular depictions of prohibition in the United States usually show the speakeasies, bootleggers, flappers, and bathtub gin of the Roaring Twenties, but earlier attempts at prohibition stretch back far into the 19th century. In 1851, Maine passed the first statewide prohibition law, and 12 other states quickly followed as temperance societies preached the evils of alcohol. Anti-prohibitionists, es...

In May of 1844, growing tensions between nativists and Irish Catholic immigrants in Philadelphia erupted into violence in the streets of the Irish Catholic Kensington district, prompted in part by a disagreement over whether the King James Bible should be read in public schools. A citizen posse called by county sheriff Morton McMichael was unable to quell the violence, and the local state militia,...

Elizabeth Packard was born in Massachusetts in 1816 into a comfortable home where her parents were able to provide for her education. She taught briefly at a girls’ school before at age 23 agreeing at her parents’ urging to marry 37-year-old Calvinist minister Theophilus Packard. Over the next 20 years Elizabeth was a devoted mother and housewife who grew the family’s vegetables and sewed clothes...

Mary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, immigrated from Northern Ireland to New York City at age 15, around 1883. She found work as a cook, a well paying job for an immigrant woman and worked for number of different families in the early 20th Century. In March 1907, civil engineer George Soper burst into the kitchen of the home where she was cooking and told her that she was spreading typho...

In 1945, United States immigration officials opened the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp in El Centro, California, to be an administrative holding center for unauthorized Mexican migrants, many of whom had been working on local farms and ranches. From the beginning, migrants were often detained for long periods of time while they served as the unpaid labor force of the center. Conditions were...

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided unanimously in  Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas  that that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Although the process was slow and contentious, the SCOTUS decisions in  Brown  and  Brown II  required that desegregation must occur "with all deliberate speed" to provide Black students with the equal prot...

Political activism of queer people in the United States started long before the Stonewall riots in 1969. One surprising place that queer people found a home for their activism was in the Communist Party. The Communist Party of the United States was established in 1919, and from the 1920s to the 1940s the Party was influential in American politics, at the forefront of labor organizing and oppositio...

Sophonisba “Nisba” Preston Breckinridge, born April 1, 1866, was a woman of firsts. Breckinridge was the first woman admitted to the Kentucky bar to practice law in 1895; the first woman to earn a PhD in Political Science at the University of Chicago in 1901; the first woman to earn a JD at the University of Chicago Law School in 1904; the first woman professor granted a named professorship at the...

usie King Taylor was born into slavery in Georgia in 1848. With the help of family members, she was educated and escaped, joining the Union army at the age of 14, to serve ostensibly as a laundress, but in reality as a nurse, teacher, and even musket preparer. In 1902, Taylor published  Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops , an autobiography that covers not ju...

Just after midnight on May 15, 1970, officers opened fire on a group of unarmed students milling in front of a dorm on the campus of Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, killing two and wounding twelve. Although the shootings took place just a week and a half after the shootings at Kent State University, the Jackson State shootings never got the attention of those at Kent State, and when...