This medallion was created by Josiah Wedgwood, a British ceramics maker and abolitionist, around 1787. The image of the kneeling slave in chains asking "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" became an international symbol of the abolitionist movement. The…

The archeological excavation of the Foley Square Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street, located near the former intersection that once comprised the Five Points neighborhood, yielded over 850,000 artifacts, some of which are depicted below. The artifacts…

Between 1942 and 1964, millions of Mexican agricultural workers entered the U.S. to work as surplus farm laborers during the government-sponsored Bracero Program. Working for lower wages than domestic farm workers, the Braceros were often victims of…

Thomas Hariot, cartographer, mathematician, and astronomer, accompanied Sir Walter Raleigh on a 1584-86 expedition of America's eastern coast. The English explored the area of the Carolina Outer Banks, calling it Virginia in honor of Queen Elizabeth,…

Milton Eisenhower, the younger brother of President Dwight E. Eisenhower, served as a special ambassador to Latin America during the Eisenhower administration. He came to see poverty as the major obstacle to economic development and political…

Henry George was a reformer and utopian whose 1886 New York City mayoral campaign as the Workingman's Party candidate had the makings of a popular uprising. Although George finished second, behind Democrat Abram S. Hewitt and ahead of Republican…

In this excerpt from a history of civil rights organizing in Mississippi during the 1960s, author Charles Payne describes the curriculum of the Freedom Schools established by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In the following excerpt, Reverend Ralph Abernathy remembers the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) at a local Baptist church on the first day of the boycott. After this, the MIA held regular weekly meetings until the…

Multi-media artist Horace Pippin, in an appendix to a book of his works published one year after his death in 1946, details his early years as a young African-American artist, his subsequent tour with the U.S. Army in France as a corporal during…

This account, originally published as a series of articles for the New York Times, details the activities of police in the 6th precinct during the 1863 Draft Riots. The 6th precinct was in the northern part of the 6th Ward, home of New York's "Five…