“People are complicated” is a truism that holds in the past and the present. Seldom do we find a person where all of their actions and thoughts are black and white. What we see instead is that people are colorful because they aren’t just one thing...
History tells us who we are and how we came to be who we are. It also allows us to look back and see how far we’ve come as people and societies. Of course, history also has the power to show us how little has changed over time. John Wood Sweet, a...
How did Indigenous people adapt and survive the onslaught of Indigenous warfare, European diseases, and population loss between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries? How did past generations of Indigenous women ensure that their culture would live...
There are a lot of books about Benjamin Franklin. They tell us about his youth and accomplishments in business, politics, and diplomacy. They tell us about his serious interest in electricity and science, and about his philanthropic work. But only a...
Mother’s Day became a national holiday on May 9, 1914 to honor all of the work mothers do to raise children. But what precisely is the work that mothers do to raise children? Has the nature of mothers, motherhood, and the work mothers do changed...
We tend to view gay marriage as a cultural and legal development of the 21st century. But did you know that some early Americans lived openly as same-sex married couples? Rachel Hope Cleves, a Professor of History at the University of Victoria in...
American prisons are overcrowded. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and nearly 2.5 million Americans are serving prison sentences. Nearly all politicians agree that we need to reform the American prison system, but...
Have you heard the saying “behind every great man stands a great woman?” Vivian Bruce Conger, the Robert Ryan Professor in the Humanities at Ithaca College, joins us to explore the two great women that Benjamin Franklin had standing...
We tend to view gay marriage as a cultural and legal development of the 21st century. But did you know that some early Americans lived openly in same-sex marriages? Rachel Hope Cleves, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Victoria...
Did you know that most biographies about the founders of the United States reveal more about the Americans who wrote the biographies than about the true character of the founders themselves? Thomas A. Foster, Professor of History at DePaul...