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In 1955, a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till was lynched after he whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the young white wife of a store proprietor. Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi and Eldridge Cleaver’s collected essays Soul on Ice, show how men and women reacted to Till’s transgression differently while experiencing an intense moment of political awakening.… MORE
1760-1800 Sancho, Ignatius, 1729-1780. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. In Two Volumes. To Which Are Prefixed, Memoirs of His Life. London: J. Nichols, 1782. [Link to Volume Two] Equiano, Olaudah, 1745?-1797. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. (2 vols.) London: The Author, 1789. 1800-1860 Brinch,… MORE
Antebellum America witnessed the growth of specialized facilities for people suffering from mental illness known as asylums. Reformers believed that the right environment and specialized care could provide some good for this “less-fortunate” class. Unsurprisingly, many of the patients who found themselves in asylums were women. These institutions went through their share of ups and downs, from the promise that came with their initial construction to the detriments of underfunding, overcrowding, unwarranted commitment, and abusive conditions seen by the end of the century. It was an area ripe for the reform impulse of the era, and a multitude of people—many of them female—contributed to the advances seen in that realm. Like other causes of that period (such as abolitionism), the rights of the mentally ill became inextricably intertwined with the rights of women.
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Few Constitutional tenets have proved to be more controversial. On February 26, 1963, the United States Supreme Court was required to apply the principles of the amendment to a challenge… MORE