Phillis Wheatley
One of the best known poets of Revolutionary New England was an enslaved Black girl named Phillis Wheatley, who was only emancipated after she published a book of 39 of her poems in London. Wheatley, ...
28 Aug 202349min
Gladys Bentley
One of the biggest stars in Prohibition Age New York was blues singer Gladys Bentley, who caused a stir in Harlem, wearing a top hat and tails, flirting with women in the audience, and singing raunchy...
21 Aug 202338min
Anna May Wong
As a child in Los Angeles, Wong Liu Tsong knew she wanted to be an actress. Adopting the screen name Anna May Wong and dropping out of school to pursue her passion, Wong landed her first lead role at ...
14 Aug 202351min
Anna Rosenberg
When Anna Rosenberg Hoffman died in 1983, the New York Times called her “one of the most influential women in the country's public affairs for a quarter of a century.” A skilled labor mediator and adv...
7 Aug 202338min
Pullman Porters & the History of the Black Working Class
In the early 20th century, career options for Black workers were limited, and the jobs often came with low pay and poor conditions. Ironically, because they were concentrated in certain jobs, Black wo...
31 Jul 202342min
The History of Black Women & Physical Fitness in the United States
In 1894, Mary P. Evans, wrote in the Woman’s Era, a Black women’s magazine, that exercise: “enables you to keep in the best condition for work with the hands or with the brain… It prepares you to meet...
24 Jul 202345min
Enslaved Women who Murdered their Enslavers
In the American colonies and then in the antebellum United States, the legal system reinforced the power and authority of slaveholders by allowing them to physically abuse the people they enslaved whi...
17 Jul 202339min
Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, the Founder of Chicago
Sometime in the mid-1780s, Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a Black man from Saint-Domingue, and his Potawatomi wife, Kitihawa, settled with their family on a swampy site near Lake Michigan called Eschec...
10 Jul 202350min
