In 1990, the Catholic Church declared Marie-Marguerite d’Youville a saint. Canonized by Pope John Paul II, she became the first Canadian born person to receive that honor, and today her name appears on churches, schools, charities, and universities across...
Church was a formerly enslaved man who rose to become one of the first Black millionaires in American history. In an era when racial violence was common and Black Americans were largely shut out of wealth and power, he...
Ernest Ouandié was a Cameroonian teacher who left the classroom to join the struggle against French colonial rule in his country. As the fight for independence intensified, he became one of the most determined leaders resisting French domination and...
In early 1861, as the United States moved toward civil war, a respected rabbi in New York shocked many Americans when he opened the Bible and argued that slavery was allowed by God. In a sermon that quickly spread...
In the years after the American Civil War, the United States entered the Reconstruction era, when formerly enslaved Africans began gaining rights that had long been denied to them. In 1868, a new constitution in Georgia granted Black men...
Few figures in world history changed events as dramatically as Toussaint Louverture. Born enslaved in the French colony of Saint Domingue, he rose from bondage to become the most important leader of the Haitian Revolution, the only large scale...
When slavery ended in the United States in 1865, nearly four million formerly enslaved Africans faced the enormous task of building new lives in a society that had long denied them freedom, education, and economic opportunity. Freedom did not...
The American West was a rough place where law and order were often difficult to maintain. Outlaws moved across vast territories, and many areas had little protection from crime. In this environment, a few lawmen became known for their...
In the late nineteenth century, European powers rushed to take control of African territory in what historians later called the Scramble for Africa. Soldiers and guns would eventually play a major role in that conquest. But before armies arrived,...
In the history of American slavery, some slaveholders are remembered not because of the wealth they accumulated but because of the suffering they inflicted on the Africans they enslaved. One such figure was “Big Jim” McClain, a slave master...
