Phrenology & Crime in 19th Century America
In Nineteenth Century America there was a strong reformist push to know and improve the self. One key tactic Americans used to learn more about themselves was phrenological readings. They would pay pr...
30 Aug 202143min
Chesapeake Bay Pirates & the 19th Century Oyster Wars
In Chesapeake Bay in the late 19th century, oyster harvesting was a big business. There were so many oyster harvesters harvesting so many oysters that the legislatures of Maryland and Virginia had to ...
23 Aug 202133min
Prohibition in the 1850s
Popular depictions of prohibition in the United States usually show the speakeasies, bootleggers, flappers, and bathtub gin of the Roaring Twenties, but earlier attempts at prohibition stretch back fa...
16 Aug 202139min
The Nativist Riots of Philadelphia in 1844
In May of 1844, growing tensions between nativists and Irish Catholic immigrants in Philadelphia erupted into violence in the streets of the Irish Catholic Kensington district, prompted in part by a d...
9 Aug 202141min
Elizabeth Packard
Elizabeth Packard was born in Massachusetts in 1816 into a comfortable home where her parents were able to provide for her education. She taught briefly at a girls’ school before at age 23 agreeing at...
2 Aug 202135min
Mary Mallon (The Sad & Complicated Story of "Typhoid Mary")
Mary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, immigrated from Northern Ireland to New York City at age 15, around 1883. She found work as a cook, a well paying job for an immigrant woman and worked f...
26 Jul 202144min
The El Centro Hunger Strike of 1985
In 1945, United States immigration officials opened the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp in El Centro, California, to be an administrative holding center for unauthorized Mexican migrants, many of...
19 Jul 202134min
Black Teachers & The Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court decided unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas that that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. Although the pro...
12 Jul 202142min
