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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How Portuguese Slave Traders Changed Ethiopia and Congo
Portuguese trading of enslaved Africans affected two major African powers in very different ways.
Water Logs
Log drivers once steered loose timber on rivers across America before railroad expansion put such shepherds out of work.
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: A Life Exploited
Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen mined Kieler's life for the plot of his most famous play, The Doll's House.
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.