Anita Bryant is hit in the face with a pie during a press conference on October 14, 1977

Proposition 6 (The Briggs Initiative): Annotated

Proposition 6, better known as the Briggs Initiative, was the first attempt to restrict the rights of lesbian and gay Americans by popular referendum.
Harvey Milk at Gay Pride, San Jose 1978

Harvey Milk’s Gay Freedom Day Speech: Annotated

Five months before his assassination in 1978, Harvey Milk called on the president of the United States to defend the rights of gay and lesbian Americans.
A classroom in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1944

Teaching Race at School

Shaken by Nazi propaganda, educators tried to teach anti-racist lessons in the 30s-40s. Their methods, however, would be considered very problematic today.
Oberlin College's Memorial Arch

A Progressive College’s Complicated Relationship with Race

Oberlin College was founded by religious idealists committed to abolitionism and integration. Then public attitudes began to shift.
Photgraph: Fred Rogers lacing up his iconic sneakers

Source: Grand Communications/The Fred Rogers Company

Long Live Mister Rogers’ Quiet Revolution

Fred Rogers argued by example and in his quiet, firm way that television’s power could be harnessed to shape future generations for good.
Carlisle Indian Industrial School

How Native Americans Taught Both Assimilation and Resistance at Indian Schools

In the nineteenth century, many Native American children attended “Indian schools” designed to blot out Native cultures in favor of Anglo assimilation.
Mansion of Happiness board game

Gamification, Then and Now

Nineteenth-century board games help to map public morality, from religious virtue to upward mobility.
Laura Bridgman

Before Helen Keller, There Was Laura Bridgman

Before Helen Keller, there was Laura Bridgman, the first blind and deaf woman who learned to communicate through language.
classroom

The Problem of School Discipline in the Twenties

Teachers, especially women, faced social pressure in both directions when it came to school discipline in the 1920s. 
Richard Rummell's iconic landscape watercolor view of Harvard University, 1906.

How Harvard Became Harvard

Older than the nation, Harvard has always been elite, but it was only in the 19th Century that it became the school of the Boston ruling class.