History

Mary Thomas, famously known as Queen Mary, was an important figure in the labour history of the Danish West Indies. Born around 1848, Thomas emerged as a formidable leader during the 1878 "Fireburn" labor riot on the island of...

On March 15, 1901, the town of Rome, Tennessee, was marred by a horrific act of racial violence that claimed the life of Ballie Crutchfield, an African American woman. The events leading to her tragic death began with a...

In the never-ending pursuit of medical cures, healers have historically engaged in some bizarre and, by modern standards, often horrific and unethical activities. One of the most bizarre is the European practice of consuming the corpses of Egyptian mummies...

John Brown was a prominent leader in the American abolitionist movement during the decades leading up to the Civil War. He became known as the leading advocate for using violence to end American slavery after years of peaceful efforts...

When we feed our bodies unhealthy meals daily, thereby overburdening our cells, they rebel by making us sick. Similarly, when slaves were overburdened and subjected to harsh conditions, some rose up in rebellion. However, slaveholders rarely addressed the underlying...

The Baixa do Cassange strike, also known as Mariano’s revolt, was a labor strike regarded as the first political action that sparked the Angolan War of Independence against Portuguese rule, which lasted from 1961 to 1974. The roots of the...

Isadore Banks was a World War I veteran and a prosperous African American landowner in Arkansas. In 1954, he was brutally lynched, and despite the horrific nature of his murder, no one was ever brought to justice. Isadore Banks was...

The Newark riots, which stand as one of the most devastating urban uprisings in American history, were part of a wave of riots in the 1960s that were sparked by long-standing racial tensions, economic deprivation and ignited by a...

Autherine Juanita Lucy was an American activist whose admission to the University of Alabama sparked a riot, leading to her suspension and eventual expulsion from the school in 1956. Born on October 5, 1929, in Shiloh, Alabama, Autherine Lucy was...

On June 22, 1940, in the small town of Luverne, Alabama, Jesse Thornton, a 26-year-old African-American man, was lynched for allegedly failing to address a white man as "Mister." Thornton managed a chicken farm and had gone to town...