The Society for Human Rights is founded by Henry Gerber in Chicago. The society is the first gay rights organization as well as the oldest documented in America. After receiving a charter from the ...

The white folks had all the courts, all the guns, all the hounds, all the railroads, all the telegraph wires, all the newspapers, all the money and nearly all the land – and we had only our ignorance, ...

The soldiers from Ft. Stoddert, Louisiana Territory, captured the fugitive Aaron Burr on a February morning in 1807, on a muddy road near the hamlet of Wakefield. Burr's fall from grace seemed total.

Eugenicists like Paul Popenoe relied on dangerously flawed theories of heredity to describe different groups of people. Popenoe shows a couple a pedigree of "Black People of Artistic Ability," 1930.

In the mid-twentieth century, the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (the predecessor to today’s March of Dimes) pioneered a new approach to philanthropy, raising money a dime at a time from ...

Three decades before the “War on Terror” and its orientation of “Islamic terrorism” as the principal threat to American security, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was its standing talisman. The color ...

Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded Hospital, where sterilizations took place. Historical postcard, from the personal collection of Alex Wellerstein. In February 1930, Concepcion Ruiz, a ...

By the dawn of the 19th century, tuberculosis—or consumption—had killed one in seven of all people that had ever lived. Throughout much of the 1800s, consumptive patients sought "the cure" in ...

She made a name for herself by speaking out against fascism abroad and at home. Then the fight got personal. On the morning of August 25, 1934, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson was taking ...

Susanna on the way to Casa Susanna, Catskills, New York, Art Gallery of Ontario © AGO In the 1960s, a group of cross-dressing men and transgender women spent ...

For over four decades, Bernice Johnson Reagon has been a major cultural voice for freedom and justice. An African American woman's voice, a child of Southwest Georgia, a voice raised in song, born in ...

Wallace is elected governor of Alabama in 1962. African American attorney J. L. Chestnut remembers George C. Wallace as "the most liberal judge that I had ever practiced law in front of" and as a ...