This photograph of American leader Harriet Tubman (1822-1913) was only recently uncovered – it was purchased by the Library of Congress at an auction in 2017. Tubman’s skills and accomplishments were truly astonishing – the backbone of the Underground Railroad, Tubman made thirteen missions into the South to liberate enslaved people. She was the first […]
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“The Long Walk” is a Navajo experience of great devastation committed by the U.S. government, especially officials Kit Carson and General Carleton. This mural, “Return from the Long Walk,” by Navajo artist Richard Kee Yazzie, portrays the resilience and renewed shared values of the Navajo survivors of the Fort Sumner internment camp. During the period
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The Great Awakening had a lot of impact. Not only did it lay the groundwork for countless American high school students to read _The Scarlet Letter_, but it created a mood of religious dynamism that inspired many to begin their own Christian denominations. Like this person here, the “Publick Universal Friend,” neé Jemima Wilkinson, born
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Pictured here is a circular plaque, commemorating the location of Fort Duquesne in 1774. Today not even ruins remain, but the location is memorable, lying at the tip of a spit of land called “the Point,” right at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in downtown Pittsburgh. As can be surmised from
“The pishtacos would kidnap people and change them into tallow to sell them for soap,” reads this ghastly modern cartoon. Legends about the pishtacos as boogeymen have been around the Andean cultures of Peru and Bolivia since the 1600s. Traditionally depicted as a white man with a beard and blue or green eyes, the pishtaco
This is a mid-19th century North American painting entitled _Indian Women Playing the Game of Plum Stones_, and testifies to the ubiquitous practice of dice gambling that American Indian women played in pre-colonial times. As evidence summarized by Warren DeBoer suggests, gambling was a pastime that American Indian women seemed to have enjoyed across
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In their momentous book — _The Dawn of Everything_ (it’s got the entire field of history all a-tizzy right now) authors David Graeber and David Wengrow argue that the Enlightenment ideas of freedom, equality, and tolerance didn’t arise out of the minds of European political philosophers as much as from Native North American Indian intellectuals.
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Here you see an illustration showing the happy and regal-looking figure of an Inca princess named Zilia. Captured from her homeland and torn from her fiancé, Zilia was rescued by a French captain and taken to Europe, where she was exposed to a culture that imagined itself enlightened, but which Zilia found repressive. Zilia
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This is a story about a ghost story — the legend of Big Liz of Greenbrier swamp. The tale dates to the American Civil War, when, according to a retelling by S.E. Schlosser, a young but powerfully strong woman — her huge arms could carry two sows at once — was suspected of being
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This extraordinary scene from a 348-long muslin painting called “Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley” was done by an American artist named John J. Egan in 1850. Looking carefully at the details, you can see that white Americans are using their black slaves to open up an American Indian burial mound. The
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Last Tuesday, Shippensburg University’s Department of History was delighted to host Professor Andrew Rotter, the Charles A. Dana Historian at Colgate University, as the speaker for our annual World History Lecture. His talk, “Olfactory Empire: Smell and the Empire in India and the Philippines,” looked at how British people experienced smell in their colonies. His
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Yesterday I got to visit this home — it is where one Jennie Wade was shot and killed at the Battle of Gettysburg. You can actually still see the bullet hole in the doorway, made by the .58 caliber that killed her. Jennie Wade was 20 years old and (remarkably) the only civilian killed at
You are looking at a tiny opening, maybe three feet wide and two feet high, that peers into a hidden room against a stairwell that served as one of the first stopping points of the northbound path of America’s Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad, of course, was the illegal highway that American enslaved people
This is the childhood face of one of the most famous Ukrainians in history, the pro-Zionist, pro-labor, and former Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir. Born Golda Mabovitch in 1898 to a carpenter father in the city of Kyiv, which was then part of the Russian Empire, Golda’s Jewish ancestry put her in company
What do all three of the women in these three images have in common? A: they each depict the American Revolutionary war heroine Molly Pitcher, and B: none of them are real. Real, as in, there was no OG Molly Pitcher historians can trace. Stories about about a woman called “Captain Molly” who served
Henry Avery was one of the most influential pirates in history, even if you’ve never heard of him until now. This Englishman led a raid in 1695 that hauled in £600,000 of treasure from a Mughal Indian ship on its return voyage from the Hajj (worth about $122,169,000 in U.S. dollars today). But it enraged
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You are looking at a Colonial American recipe for abortion. Published in 1748, it was not the only at-home herbal abortifacient of the time, but it was one of the most well read. And given the publisher, that makes sense — it was Ben Franklin. Eager to adapt a British guidebook that had set out
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This grizzly painting of two polar bears rending apart the remains of human corpses with a shipwreck in the background is the subject of a fascinating urban legend. Called _Man Proposes, God Disposes_, it was painted by artist Edwin Landseer in 1864 to depict the tragic failure of Englishman Sir John Franklin’s Arctic expedition 19
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This is a fanciful rendition of the Spanish _conquistador_ Hernán Cortés (d. 1547), dressed as an Ancient Roman centurion. The imagery is unusual for a number of reasons: first, Cortés was the main player that brought about the destruction of the Aztec Empire, which happened over a thousand years past Ancient Rome’s heyday. The artist
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This is the face of Queen Nanny of the Maroons, a hero so important to Jamaican history that she earned her visage on the $500 Jamaican bill. Living from indeterminate dates from the 1600s to 1700s, accounts of Queen Nanny largely come from oral histories and are difficult to pin down with certainty. She probably
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