Rose Cecil O'Neill was an iconoclast in every sense of the word. A self-taught bohemian artist, who ascended through a male-dominated field to become a top illustrator and the first to build a merchandising empire from her work, with her invention of the Kewpie doll.
This is a revision of the Headlines and Heroes 2019 International Women’s Day blog. Sunday, March 8, 2020, was International Women’s Day and today we return to our historical newspaper archives for stories featuring change-making women in newspapers searchable in Chronicling America. This database, sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of …
In a time of extreme racism and yellow journalism, documenting and speaking the truth about lynchings in the South was a rare and dangerous act. But that did not stop journalist Ida B. Wells.
Events in Rosa Parks' life are chronicled in newspapers and comic books and reinforce her well-justified iconic status. At times, though, their simplified coverage perpetuates the myth of Parks as the quiet seamstress who was too tired to stand to give up her seat.
Introducing the great, cyclonic, Eva Tanguay—the world’s most eccentric comedienne and most loved musical comedy star on the American stage that you probably never even heard of! Eva Tanguay was the highest-paid and billed as the most outrageous star of vaudeville’s golden age. Born in Marbleton, Canada, her family relocated to Holyoke, Massachusetts when she …
“Onstage, she looks as regal and exotic as a Russian princess; offstage, she is as American as wampum and apple pie,” cheered TIME magazine about prima ballerina Maria Tallchief in 1951. One of the most celebrated Native American women of the 20th century, Tallchief was the first American dancer in the history of ballet to earn …
Have your Halloween costume picked out yet? Why not go dressed as Bessie McCoy, the original Yama Yama Girl? During the 1910s, the Yama Yama Girl costume was all the rage. But who was the Yama Yama Girl and why did people dress up as her? Stage actress and vaudeville performer Elizabeth G. McEvoy (also …
For 82 years people have tried to solve the mystery Amelia Earhart's disappearance, but in 1937 America remembered her as the brave pioneer woman who conquered flight.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal…” On July 20, 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York, the first Woman’s Rights Convention approved a Declaration of Sentiments, which had been drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and modeled after the Declaration of Independence in its commitment to secure women’s …