Tape v. Hurley (1885) is one the most important civil rights decisions that you've likely never heard of. The parents of American-born Mamie Tape successfully challenged a principal's refusal to enroll their daughter and other children of Chinese heritage into the Spring Valley Primary School in San Francisco, California, seven decades before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.
The following post, written by Peter DeCraene, the 2020-21 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress, was originally posted to the Teaching with the Library of Congress Blog. Books often surprise me – plot twists, different historical perspectives, or deeply drawn characters – but recently, I found a different kind of surprise …
The following is a guest post by Arlene Balkansky. Arlene recently retired from being a librarian in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, and was a regular writer for Headlines and Heroes. On May 29, 1851 at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth delivered what would …
Pharaoh, pirate, soldier, spy. Most have heard of Joan of Arc, but throughout history and across cultures, there have been a great number of women who have dressed in male attire in order to fulfill the roles that had traditionally been reserved for men. Many disguised their identities, sometimes taking their secret to the grave, while others were brazen, and even celebrated by their contemporaries. While their stories have largely been lost to time, there are some that made their mark on history.
In 1966, Bertram A. Fitzgerald began publishing an educational comic series on Black history in the hopes of inspiring students in much the same way he had been inspired by comics series like Classics Illustrated and Black writers such as Alexandre Dumas, author of the Three Musketeers, and Alexander Pushkin, a Russian poet, playwright, and …
Julianne Mangin is an independent researcher, writer, family historian, and blogger. She is a retired librarian who worked as a website developer at the Library of Congress from 1998 to 2011. This post highlights the ways Julianne has used online resources like Chronicling America* for her research. Amber Paranick (AP): How did you first learn …
This month Chronicling America added newspapers from its 50th contributor – the University of the Virgin Islands! This first newspaper from the U.S. Virgin Islands, the St. Croix Avis, provides a deep dive into a particularly tumultuous time in the U.S. Virgin Islands. In 1867, the islands were on the cusp of being sold to the United States when a hurricane, earthquake, and tsunami struck within a month. Covering the events of 1867 was the St. Croix Avis.
Arlene has been an expert librarian and an accomplished blogger for Headlines and Heroes, writing incredible posts on WWI and Frederick Douglass (to name a few). She recently retired and will be missed by all! Read about some of her favorite collections and moments at the Library.
The amount of people who owe their lives to Dr. Charles R. Drew is beyond measure. The African American physician and surgeon pioneered the preservation of blood and plasma at the start of World War II and remained a leading authority on the subject for the rest of his career. He is responsible for America's first major blood banks and introduced the use of mobile blood donation and transport stations—later known as “bloodmobiles.”
