How Black homesteaders built a town in Nicodemus Kansas
Nicodemus is still there, on the high plains of Graham County in northwestern Kansas. It is a National Historic Site now, with a handful of residents and five historic buildings,…
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What we actually know about women who enlisted in disguise
This is a subject where the popular literature and the documentary record have drifted a long way apart, and I want to walk through both, because the real version is more…
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What happened to the refugee camps of the Civil War
They were called contraband camps, and the name comes from a legal argument rather than from anything humane.
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The women the Union Army actually employed
Ask a class who worked for the Union Army and you get soldiers, and after some prompting, nurses. That is roughly where the textbook stops, and it leaves out thousands of women…
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Why smallpox spread through wartime Richmond
Disease killed more men in the Civil War than combat did. That sentence appears in most textbooks and then nothing is done with it.
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Why Native scouts served with the federal cavalry in the West
The question students always ask, once they learn that Native men served as scouts for the United States Army against other Native people, is why anyone would do that.
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The southern mill strikes that history textbooks forgot
American labour history, as taught in most high schools, happens in northern cities. Coal in Pennsylvania, steel in Chicago, garment work in New York.
