Nineteenth Century America
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…
Read More
Looking Forward to Juneteenth
On June 19, 1865, Union General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3, which announced the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas, from a balcony in Galveston Texas, or so the story goes. It was two and a half years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect and 2 months after the Civil War had…
Read More
“Stagecoach Mary” Fields Carries the Mail
Fifty years before the Six Triple Eight Central Postal Directory Battalion made postal history, a six-foot tall, powerfully built formerly enslaved woman named “Stagecoach Mary” Fields delivered the mail in rural Montana as a Star Route Carrier for the United States Post Office.* When Mary was emancipated, she left West Virginia, where she had been…
Read More