“ I always tried to do the best. I knew I couldn’t always be the best, but I tried to be.” ~Frank Robinson On February 7, 2019, Hall of Fame baseball player Frank Robinson passed away at the age of 83 in Los Angeles, California. During his career, he had nearly 3,000 hits, .294 … Continue reading Tribute to Hall of Famer Frank Robinson
Today's post is written by Dr. Dennis Patrick Halpin, an Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech whose research examines how race, class, and gender shaped the 19th and 20th century urban experience in the United States. He's been conducting research at the National Archives at Philadelphia, focused primarily on the records of the United States District Court … Continue reading Early Civil Rights Protest and the Steamer Sue Case
November 18, 2018 marked 40 years since the passing of 918 people in the jungles of Guyana. While debate still exists as to whether or not the event was one of mass suicide or mass murder, the event was a tragedy resulting in the greatest single loss of American civilian life until the events of … Continue reading Remembering Jonestown 40 Years Later
“Knowledge is power. Information is liberating. Education is the premise of progress, in every society, in every family.” ~Kofi Annan On August 18, 2018, Kofi Annan passed away at the age 80 in Bern, Switzerland. He was the first person from sub-Saharan Africa to lead the United Nations (UN). Under Annan’s leadership, the UN re-established … Continue reading The Gentle Peacemaker: Tribute to Kofi Annan
“You cannot define a person on just one thing. You can’t just forget all these wonderful and good things that a person has done because one thing didn’t come off the way you thought it should come off.” ~Aretha Franklin On August 16, 2018, legendary singer and songwriter Aretha Franklin passed away at the age … Continue reading R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Tribute to the Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin
Today's post was written by Greg Foster, a second year graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, who is a summer intern in the Textual Processing Division at the National Archives at College Park. When I began my summer internship at the National Archives and Records Administration at College Park, Maryland, my first assignment was to … Continue reading Tears of America: The Riots of 1968
Today's post was written by Cody White, Archivist at the National Archives at Denver The stark, black and white Denver Post photograph one finds online is startling; in it two firemen are sweeping broken glass from a window shattered by a pipe bomb while Wilfred Keyes and his wife, just shadows in the dark of … Continue reading Keyes v. School District Number One, Denver, Colorado; Eliminating the “Root and Branch” of School Segregation
Today's blog was written by Tina L. Ligon, Supervisory Archivist in Textual Processing at the National Archives at College Park, Maryland The boycotts, protests, and marches of the 1950s and 1960s contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act (1965). These pieces of legislation assisted with the … Continue reading Resurrection City: The Continuation of King’s Dream
“[B]inary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the mess, inchoate reality of history as live.” ~ Ira Berlin On June 5, 2018, Ira Berlin passed away at age 77, in the Washington, D. C. area. He was an award-winning historian and Distinguished Professor of History at … Continue reading Many Thousands Gone: Tribute to Ira Berlin
Lynching remains one of the most disturbing and least understood atrocities in American history. Defining the act of lynching is also controversial and for the purpose of the blog series, lynching is defined as the killing of women who were: 1) tortured, mutilated, burned, shot, dragged, raped, and/or hung, 2) accused of an alleged or … Continue reading Lynching of Women in United States Blog Series: The Lynching of Mrs. Mary Turner and Her Family
