General History

Birmingham began as a boomtown filled with immigrants who held on to the best recipes from their homelands. More recently, locals like Frank Stitt and Carole Griffin helped transform the modern southern city into a foodie destination with the best of...

Billy Engel was a ten-year-old boy who had lived all his life in a city in northern Illinois. One day his parents began thinking that they would like to live on a farm. They drove around and looked at several farms, and finally decided that they liked...

Beyond the River brings to brilliant life the dramatic story of the forgotten heroes of the Ripley, Ohio, line of the Underground Railroad. From the highest hill above the town of Ripley, Ohio, you can see five bends in the Ohio River. You can see the...

Arthur Briggs's life was Homeric in scope. Born on the tiny island of Grenada, he set sail for Harlem during the Renaissance, then to Europe in the aftermath of World War I, where he was among the first pioneers to introduce jazz music to the world...

The story of the decades-long fight to bring justice to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, culminating in Sen. Doug Jones' prosecution of the last living bombers. On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,...

Originally published in 1868--when it was attacked as an "indecent book" authored by a "traitorous eavesdropper"--Behind the Scenes is the story of Elizabeth Keckley, who began her life as a slave and became a privileged witness to the presidency of...

The black experience in America--starting from its origins in western Africa up to 1961--is examined in this seminal study from a prominent African American figure. The entire historical timeline of African Americans is addressed, from the Colonial...

1963. It is a year stamped as one of the most turbulent during the Civil Rights movement. Centuries of racial oppression were confronted with peaceful protests challenging segregation laws. Responses to protests were often met with brutality. Four young...

Best-selling author and beloved chronicler of Los Angeles D.J. Waldie reconsiders the city in a collection of contemporary essays.Nobody sees Los Angeles with more eloquence than D. J. Waldie. - Susan Brenneman, Los Angeles Times Deputy Op-Ed...

Following the Civil War, Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee, thrived as a cauldron of sex and song, violence and passion. But out of this turmoil emerged a center of black progress, optimism, and cultural ferment. Preston Lauterbach tells this vivid,...

Higher education in a war zone? It's what an assortment of educators from Baylor University sought to do in Northern Iraq during 2003-2007, the perilous first years of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The desire to help Iraqi Kurds stand tall again as Iraq...

Barry Farm-Hillsdale was created under the auspices of the Freedmen's Bureau in 1867 in what was then the outskirts of the nation's capital. Residents built churches and schools, and the community became successful. In the 1940s, youth from the community...

The compelling history of how Latino immigrants revitalized the nation's cities after decades of disinvestment and white flight Thirty years ago, most people were ready to give up on American cities. We are commonly told that it was a "creative class"...

Author and journalist Cody McDevitt tells the story of one of the worst civil rights injustices in Western Pennsylvania history.In 1923, in response to the fatal shooting of four policemen, the mayor of Johnstown ordered every African

Victorine Quille Adams was a Baltimore native and the first African American woman elected to the city council. Born in 1912, she lived through stringent segregation, racial violence and economic turbulence Victorine Quille Ad

In 1941 photographer Croswell Bowen joined American Field Service volunteer ambulance drivers and served alongside the British Eighth Army during World War II. As the war continued to escalate, he would have his mental, emotional, and physical well-being...