Negotiating Slavery
Harriet Jacobs’ narrative demonstrates that slavery was not a monolithic institution of absolute power. Instead, the power dynamics of slavery frequently changed hands between master and slave, albeit how small.
19th CenturyGender
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Ill Amidst the Verdant Vales
Today, it takes thirty-nine hours to drive from Eliza Hart Spalding’s hometown in east New York State to Walla Walla, Washington. In 1836, when she and Narcissa Prentiss Whitman became the first white women to cross the Rockies, it was a seven-month ordeal to reach what was then known as Oregon Territory; Mary Richardson Walker… MORE
Whites on Bikes
The story of bicycling in the United States begins in the years just after the Civil War. In the mid-1860s, French mechanics working in blacksmith and carriage shops helped develop machines known as “velocipedes” (from the Latin words velox pedis, or “swift of foot”). Early champions hailed the new technology largely for its utility. Calling… MORE
Harriet Beecher Stowe, the “Little Woman who wrote the Book that Started This Great War”
In 1852, Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a sentimental tale condemning the institution of slavery by demonstrating the manner in which it tore apart families apart, from the slave families sold away from each other in the interstate slave trade to the slave-owning families corrupted by their own system.