African-American History
History on Display: The National Civil Rights Museum
Because we are heading into the Martin Luther King holiday weekend here in the United States. I thought it was an appropriate time to re-run my post on our visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in the spring of 2024. It turns out that I didn’t write one. With questions of institutionalized…
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Buffalo Soldiers on Bicycles
This is one of my favorite stories from our visit to Fort Snelling: After the American Civil War, Congress created six regiments of Black soldiers, led for the most part by white officers, known informally as Buffalo Soldiers.[1] One of those regiments , the 25th Black Infantry, was posted at Fort Snelling in 1880. Eight…
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The Exodusters
In 1870s, after the failed promise of equality and opportunity under Reconstruction had ended, thousands of formerly enslaved Black Americans headed to Kansas and other Western states, hoping to take advantage of the opportunity to own land offered by the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave 160 acres of federal land to anyone who agreed…
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