At the age of nineteen, Robert F. Weir of West Point, New York, ran away to sea, where he spent the next ten years. Assuming the pseudonym Robert Wallace, Weir sailed aboard the bark Clara Bell out of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, in 1855 for a voyage to the whaling grounds of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Upon the death of the boatsteerer, Weir ......
A Citizen's Guide to Power, Politics, and Government
Shifting demographics. Downstate versus Chicago. Billionaires and bribery. Even veteran observers need a roadmap to track Illinois' ever-changing political landscape. Melissa Mouritsen, Kent D. Redfield, and James D. Nowlan provide an up-to-date primer on Prairie State politics, government, and policies. Features include: Discussions of ......
Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon
Mary Rippon was a pioneer woman educator in the male-dominated world of nineteenth-century academia. As the first female professor at the University of Colorado, she is believed to have been the first woman in the U.S. to teach at a state university. Mary received wide acclaim for her teaching, but Victorian society forced her to lead two very ......
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains practiced an archival art-narrating war exploits in large-scale paintings executed on animal hide robes, shirts, tipi covers, and tipi liners. Essentially autobiographical, the paintings were worn and lived in by the men whose war exploits they portrayed, ......
Family Stories from a Black-Owned Dairy, Louisiana to California and Beyond
Opened in 1907 in Shreveport, Louisiana, by Lizzetta LeFalle-Collins's grandfather, Black dairy farmer Angus Bates, Lakeside Dairy was a rarity in the post-Reconstruction South. The dairy thrived despite the time's challenging, racially oppressive, and hostile social and political climate. While Lakeside Dairy closed in 1943, Angus's life and work ......
The Pascagoula River is the largest unobstructed river in the contiguous United States. Because of this lack of restraint, the river has been left to rise and fall naturally with the seasons, overflowing annually into the adjoining bottomland forest.?This phenomenon makes the Pascagoula River one of the wildest rivers, surrounded by some of the ......
Alaska Native elders remember wartime invasion, relocation, and land reclamation The US government justified its World War II occupation of Alaska as a defense against Japan's invasion of the Aleutian Islands, but it equally served to advance colonial expansion in relation to the geographically and culturally diverse Indigenous communities ......
Alaska Native elders remember wartime invasion, relocation, and land reclamation The US government justified its World War II occupation of Alaska as a defense against Japan's invasion of the Aleutian Islands, but it equally served to advance colonial expansion in relation to the geographically and culturally diverse Indigenous communities ......
Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom
Chronicles the history of emancipation through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a remarkable generation of black northerners The Rising Generation chronicles the long history of emancipation in the United States through the cradle-to-grave experiences of a generation of black New Yorkers. Born into precarious freedom after the American ......