Today in 1847, the state of Missouri put a significant obstacle in front of a civil rights activist's efforts to educate Black students in St. Louis. But he found a way around it.
For Black History Month, the story of the Blackwell Family Tree, a genealogy project that traces on Black family's history back through thousands of people and hundreds of years.
It's Abe Lincoln's birthday, and if you want to see a small bit of the man himself, you could try heading to Syracuse, New York, where there’s a bit of Abe Lincoln’s hair in a very unusual decoration known as the Hairy Eagle.
Today in 1943, the US announced it would start rationing shoes to save rubber and leather for the troops in World War II. People on the home front found ways to make shoes out of alternative materials.
This week in 1920, a federal law enforcing the Constitution's Prohibition Amendment took effect. But there were loopholes, and one of the most clever way to use those loopholes was through something known as the "grape brick" or "wine brick."
Dr. King's home city gave him a warm welcome after he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, though putting that warm welcome together got complicated.
There was a really interesting piece on J-STOR recently that washes away the widespread idea that the Middle Ages in Europe was just unbelievably filthy. Why is it that we think the Middle Ages WAS so dirty?
Today in 1907 Oklahoma became the 46th state in the Union. Oklahoma's panhandle has a complicated history that includes a time when it was known as “No Man’s Land.”
Today in 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes got a phone installed at the White House. It's been used to make landmark deals, shape the course of world events, and even say hi to astronauts on the moon. And Lyndon Johnson infamously used that phone to talk to a tailor.
Sometime on this night in 1920 the president of France fell out of a moving train. And the story got weirder from there.
