William Maclure

A Boatload of Knowledge for New Harmony

Leaders of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences voyaged down the Ohio River in 1825–1826, taking academic education on a journey in search of utopia.
Mathilde “Missy” de Morny

The Cross-Dressing Superstar of the Belle Époque

Mathilde de Morny's commitment to a masculine aesthetic and a non-traditional lifestyle in nineteenth-century France challenged the boundaries of gender identity.
A Hawaiian postcard, 1962

Consuming Hawai‘i’s Golden People

With statehood in 1959 came “Aloha Spirit” tourism, turning Hawai‘i’s ethnic diversity into a commodity that benefited both business and US foreign policy.
Prison Work Crew c. 1929

Race, Prison, and the Thirteenth Amendment

Critiques of the Thirteenth Amendment have roots in a long history of activists who understood the imprisonment of Black people as a type of slavery.
An Obeah figure brought to England in 1888, taken from a man arrested in Morant Bay, Jamaica, in 1887. The police had suspected him of being an Obeah-man, and thought his possession of this figure proved it.

Poison and Magic in Caribbean Uprisings

Witchcraft and poisoning were closely connected for both West Africans and the Europeans who enslaved them in the eighteenth-century Caribbean.
A sports page from the Pittsburgh Courier

How the Black Press Helped Integrate Baseball

In the 1930s and ’40s, Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier used their platform to help break the sport’s color line.
Lady Florence Baker

Florence Baker, Unsung Survivor

Narrowly escaping slavery herself, Baker risked her life to repress the Saharan slave trade, sought the source of the Nile, and challenged Victorian social conventions.
View of the Rock of Gibraltar as seen from the Sierra Carbonera Mountains of Cadiz, Spain

Gibraltar: Where Two Worlds Meet, the Monkeys Roam

Home to the genetically unique Barbary macaques, Gibraltar serves up an intriguing mix of European cultures to residents and tourists alike.
People at a civil rights demonstration holding posters reading 'No More Birminghams', in reference to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church (in Birmingham, Alabama), Washington DC, US, 22nd September 1963.

“A Time To Speak”: Annotated

On September 15, 1963, a bomb killed four Black children in Birmingham, Alabama. Who threw that bomb? Each of us, argued Birmingham lawyer Charles Morgan, Jr.