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March 16 - March 25, 2025
Such is often the experience of any government run by fallible human beings. Sometimes we surprise ourselves in our capacity for greatness, and sometimes the weight of regret wraps around us like a chain. The ideals outlined in the Constitution represent our national purpose, the raft we must cling to in the storm, the breath in our lungs, the beat in our chest: Just. Peaceful. Good. Free.
Butler’s mistress, Sumner asserted, was a “harlot,” who was “ugly to others, but lovely to him.”[14] That mistress was the enslavement of Africans.
Preston Brooks struck Charles Sumner again and again, blows raining down with sickening thuds, until Sumner was unconscious, bleeding profusely, and severely injured. Considering his message delivered, Brooks left the Senate chamber. Charles Sumner was so gravely wounded that he was not able to resume his seat in Congress for three years. Three years.
Brooks resigned from Congress in July 1856. And was then immediately reelected one month later. So no, America is not “the worst it’s ever been” today, despite what some news anchors might be trying to convince you of, because if they can make you afraid, they can gain your attention and your money. Has anyone been beaten half to death on the floor of the Senate over the topic of whether it’s cool to enslave people this week? No? Okay.
For eight weeks, nearly sixty-year-old Clara walked, sometimes shushing through prairie grasses as tall as her cheeks, sometimes ascending steep, rocky hills with the vigor of a woman half her age. Not only did she walk the entire seven hundred miles to Colorado, she also prepared three full meals a day in between walks for two dozen ravenous people.
We should just go ahead and put Clara’s picture in the dictionary next to the term “self-made.” Everything Clara had, she earned from her own hands, from the sweat of her brow and the steel in her resolve.
As new people arrived in Colorado, they soon heard tell of a woman who was always quick with a meal or a bandage, a cot for a nap, or a place to rent for the month. They called her the Angel of the Rockies.[8]
People who knew and loved Clara mounted a letter-writing and speech-giving campaign to lobby for Clara’s inclusion as an official pioneer. Their efforts worked, and Clara became the first woman to receive the designation. She had pioneered Colorado every bit as much as the miners and the speculators whose laundry she had done. She had helped shape the state in ways no one else could.
Crowds packed her funeral, with both the mayor and the governor seated prominently in the front church pew. Her burial plot was donated by the Colorado Pioneer Association. A stained-glass portrait of Clara now hangs in the Old Supreme Court Chambers in Denver. She is memorialized at the Smithsonian.
“I will not, I cannot, justify owning slaves,” but who never freed any of the human beings under his control. Richmond was where he launched the phrase “Give me liberty or give me death!” in an impassioned speech in 1775, while never offering liberty to the people he enslaved. Liberty was apparently only for me, but not for thee.
For all the things one could learn about Paul Revere, he rode a horse and shouted at people is perhaps one of the least interesting.
Paul Revere’s bell in Falmouth, Massachusetts, was cast in 1796. The church still possesses the original receipt, written in Revere’s handwriting. It says they paid $338.94. The bell waits for its cue, its chance to ring out the Sunday meeting, as it’s done for more than two hundred years. It rang on the day of Katie’s father’s funeral in 1859, and again when the women of the congregation draped their mourning shawls over the windows after Abraham Lincoln was shot. The outside of the bell reads, “The living to the church I call, and to the grave I summon all.”[8]
The Higher Education of Women is one of the great world battle-cries for freedom; for right against might.”[16]
she still felt stifled by the societal expectations placed on women: “We can calculate eclipses, but we are not free from the tyranny of the needle.”[2] Again, with the sewing. Being a female scholar had unique demands—not only were they expected to research and teach but they still had to undertake all of the domestic duties, unlike their male counterparts.
The Pledge of Allegiance was written especially for the fair, recited by children around a flagpole, designed to be adopted by schools nationwide to promote what some would call patriotism, and others would call a reflection of xenophobia.[2] Francis Bellamy, the author, said he was concerned about all the new immigrants pledging loyalty to their own countries of origin, and this was meant to remind them that they owed their loyalty to America only.
We also have Bertha Palmer, whose husband owned a famous Chicago hotel, to thank for the invention of the brownie, arguably one of the best treats of all time. Inside the Women’s Building, box lunches were served, and Bertha Palmer directed the chef at the hotel to come up with a dessert that could withstand the jostling of delivery and the heat of the summer.)
The impression made, Katie and Katharine departed Chicago and continued their journey west, across the plains and into Colorado. As their summer school drew to a close, they had the chance to ascend Pike’s Peak on a cog tram, to visit Garden of the Gods, and to breathe in the landscape that was unlike anything they had seen on voyages anywhere else, with craggy sandstone rocks rising like giants out of the forest. It was a landscape that Clara Brown had helped pioneer just a few decades before.
A short time later, she received a letter congratulating her on the poem’s acceptance for publication, and she eagerly waited for the edition that contained her newest work to arrive, along with a check for five dollars. The date was July 4, 1895.[6]
Katie’s published poem was immediately beloved by Americans far and wide. It went viral before anyone knew what going viral meant.
Katie became the first known person to write a breast cancer narrative, as she watched her beloved suffer through the surgery. Katharine recuperated at home, surrounded by their collie and their friends. She never returned to her full quality of life, but she had it better than most breast cancer patients of the time, who were typically shuttered away in darkened rooms, hidden from society.[11]
Katie asks us to work for justice, embrace peace, to do and be good, and for us to love liberty. And for that, she says, we will someday be rewarded in a place undimmed by human tears. (By the way, “Thine alabaster cities gleam” is a direct reference to the White City of the World’s Columbian Exhibition.)
Inez was a Milholland, raised by parents with serious progressive principles. Her father, John, helped found the NAACP, and counted Ida B. Wells as a personal friend.
Many white women went along with it: suffrage was so important to them that they were willing to leave Black women behind in order to gain the right to vote for themselves.
Because they knew that a huge part of the country’s opposition to their suffrage was opposition to Black women being enfranchised, white women were often willing to not just look the other way but to intentionally exclude Black women for the purposes of appeasing white men.
Some even tried to entice southerners by essentially saying, “We know y’all don’t like the fact that Black men can vote, so why not mitigate the damage Black men are doing by giving white women the right to cast a ballot?” Susan B. Anthony famously once said, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.”
It’s a testament to the horse and his rider that he didn’t spook, rear up, and take off, as he was surrounded by thousands of angry men who were furious that women were demanding what already rightfully belonged to them—equality and freedom.
Helen Keller was so rattled and upset by the events that she was unable to appear as scheduled at the tableau.
the foremost women of America, college women, social workers, lawyers, physicians, wives of Senators and Representatives, and all these were allowed to be insulted and their lives jeopardized by crowds of drunken men. The police would not even rope off the streets for us…the militiamen who were present along the route were all drunk.”[14] The granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton was hit by an intoxicated man while the nearby police did nothing. Another attempted to scale a float and throw a woman off it. Hundreds of demonstrating women had bruises creeping across their bodies and faces the
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To prove the point that North America didn’t need to be discovered by Columbus because people already lived here, a Native American man named Adam Fortunate Eagle flew to an international event taking place in Italy. In preparation for his trip, he began to research the “discovery” of Italy, much like American students learn of Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas. But he found there was no such myth, no tale of a heroic aha moment on the part of an explorer.
The Italians got it. They took the joke, and Fortunate Eagle was invited to meet the pope. When the pope held up his ring so Fortunate Eagle could kiss it, Fortunate Eagle held out his hand instead, his finger heavy with a ring made from American turquoise. I imagine what was happening in their minds as they held out their hands to each other. “You may kiss my ring.” “No, you can kiss MY ring.” “I am not kissing your ring, I am the pope.” “Well, I’m not kissing your ring, I just discovered Italy.”
In it, she says, “A democracy, we have been taught for many a year, is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. What is a man?” she asks. “A man is a person. What is a person? A person is a human being—a person has a soul. Is woman a human being? Yes, a woman is a human being. Has woman a soul?” she asks. “Yes, woman has a soul.”[7]
Walt Disney was too young to enlist like his older brothers, so he altered his own birth certificate to make himself eligible to drive an ambulance for the Red Cross in France. At the time, you only had to be seventeen for ambulance service, whereas you had to be eighteen for military service. Walt missed shipping out with his unit because he became very ill as the worldwide flu pandemic raged.[10] He was so sick that the doctors at the ambulance driver training program said that if he had any hope of making it, he needed to go home, because if he stayed with all the other sick people, he
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After Maria arrived, she received her duty assignment at a hospital that was run by women. The United States refused to allow women who were trained physicians to serve in WWI. There were roughly eighty female doctors who were like, “I would like to serve, please send me,” and the United States essentially said, “No, thanks anyway.”[12] So what did the women doctors do? Sit back and complain that the government was allowing soldiers to suffer instead of using the willing and able services of trained surgeons? No. They fundraised to go on their own.
When they got to France, France was like, “Yes, please, we will take all the help we can get—if you are a surgeon, we don’t care what gender you are.”
Coverture laws, like the one in force in Illinois, said that women were legally “covered” by a man. If she was single, her father was meant to oversee her, and if she was married, the job fell to her husband. Women had few rights of their own—not to own property, not even legal rights to parent the children she birthed. In Illinois, if a couple divorced, the man got to dictate the terms of custody, and if he wanted to keep a woman from seeing her babies, he could. If a woman was deemed too much trouble, was too opinionated or intelligent, if she had what a man regarded as any emotional
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Humans aren’t so much afraid of failure as they are of having people watch them fail. The shame doesn’t come from not scaling the summit, it’s from the people who judge you for not having succeeded. So you have to admire Rebecca, who was likened to a tiny tornado, a woman in her later years, who most definitely was being judged.
The next year, she went to bat for the appointment again, having spent considerable time getting to know the legislators who were in the position of power to make the call. This time, when the legislative session opened, it was Rebecca whose voice filled the room, lifting a prayer to the almighty, as the men listened with bowed heads. Rebecca was the first female chaplain of a legislative body in world history.
Territorial organizers wanted more settlers so they could gain statehood. Correction: they wanted more white settlers.
“How can our nation be free with half of its citizens mute and unadvised? In union alone is strength!”[12]
Suffrage workers sprang into action planning a memorial befitting such a hero, and one month later, on Christmas Day, she was memorialized in Statuary Hall inside the U.S. Capitol. She was the first women ever honored there, and she was the first person so honored who wasn’t a member of Congress.
(In 2019, the Department of the Interior renamed a peak in the Adirondacks in her honor. You can visit Mount Inez in the town of Lewis, New York.)
Her brother Joseph was fascinated by fossils. It’s long been a source of amusement to me that some of the greatest thinkers in history, the people of the Enlightenment, the humans who wrote the Constitution and founded the world’s oldest democracy, didn’t know about dinosaurs.
Yes, over the years, farmers and builders had dug up large bones and seen things they didn’t understand. But paleontology wasn’t a field until the nineteenth century. No one was out there Ross Geller-ing fossil identification. (By the way, did anyone actually buy the idea that Ross on Friends had a PhD and worked at a very prestigious facility? Come on now.)
Why were the Quakers so hated in England? For starters, they refused to do things like bow to their superiors or remove their hats in deference, because they believed in the equality of all people. This was, of course, a direct affront to the king and the aristocracy. They refused to pay tithes and would not swear an oath, both of which were quite problematic in 1600s Britain.
Some Quaker beliefs blended well with other forms of Christianity, but the Quaker belief about the Divine Immanence, sometimes called an Inner Light, a Divine Spark, or the Light of Christ, puts all humans on equal footing—people of all colors, races, and genders.
For example, a notice in The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1883 shows Mary and Samuel Jeanes as having contributed to a children’s sanitarium.[13] Another article shows that both Samuel and Joseph sent money to a fund to help flood victims out west.[14] The Jeanes Six cared about the human condition, not about naming rights.
The implication was clear to William: His life was not worth saving, and everyone would be better off if he were dead. Distraught, he hobbled beneath a pine tree, and for more than an hour, begged God to let him die. When the prayer was done, he laid down, folded his arms, and waited for the prayer to work. For his life on earth to end.
Anna’s bequest was one of the first times that a northern philanthropist insisted that the board of governors of a fund be of mixed race, and that Black men be among the primary determiners of how the money that was to benefit their community be used. Anna believed that people could decide for themselves what their community needed, and that people of all races should have equal seats at the table.
After Taft was elected president, he continued to serve on the board of the Jeanes Fund, which met at the White House to discuss plans for distributing the money.[13]
Many believed that segregation was the nature of society, and while Booker felt that someday it might end if African Americans worked hard enough to make themselves acceptable to the white community, that someday was not 1908.
