The Peshtigo Fire on October 8, 1871, Wood engraving, published in 1872.

Peshtigo: The Nation’s Deadliest Fire

On the same night as Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871, some 2,400 square miles of Wisconsin and Michigan burned in a firestorm that took more than 1,000 lives.
Pat McCarran

The End of Asian Exclusion, the Beginning of Caribbean Exclusion

The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act allowed first-generation Japanese American immigrants to become US citizens while keeping African Caribbean immigrants out.
Young female and her little son planting tree in one of city parks on summer day

Building Community and Urban Tree Canopy

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, Black communities and other reformers in New York City recognized the ameliorative social effects of greening urban spaces.
An illustration titled “Protecting The Settlers" by JR Browne for his work "The Indians Of California,” 1864

Genocide in California

The extermination campaigns against the Yuki people, sparked by the California Gold Rush and statehood, weren’t termed genocide until the mid 1970s.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tuskegee University’s Audio Collections

The archives of the historically Black Tuskegee University recently released recordings from 1957 to 1971, with a number by powerful civil rights leaders.
leaders of Kongo receiving the Portugeuse, ca. pre-1840

How Portuguese Slave Traders Changed Ethiopia and Congo

Portuguese trading of enslaved Africans affected two major African powers in very different ways.
Logging in the Oregon forests, c. 1917

Water Logs

Log drivers once steered loose timber on rivers across America before railroad expansion put such shepherds out of work.
Ali Wallace, 1905

Ali: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Right-Hand Gun

Wallace wouldn't have become a famous naturalist without help from colonial networks and hundreds of locals, including his indefatigable Sarawak servant, Ali.
Laura Kieler

Laura Kieler: A Life Exploited

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen mined Kieler's life for the plot of his most famous play, The Doll's House.
A group of women sit in the waiting room of the American Birth Control League Clinic, New York, 1921

Pro-Sex Feminists of the 1920s

In the early decades of the twentieth century, political and social activists saw separating sex from marriage and reproduction as an issue of freedom.