Nineteenth Century America
Chicago’s Great Fire
If you’re a person with a taste for history and you live in Chicago, there are some stories that you can’t avoid.* The Columbian Exposition. The rise of the skyscraper. The Hay Market Square riot.** The Chicago Fire. But the thing about stories that you “know” through osmosis is that you often don’t really know…
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Reading My Way to The 19th Amendment
Like many of us, I had plans for the hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment. One of those plans was to run a series of blog posts about the suffrage movement in July and August. Then my life took a sharp turn: first I wrote a history book for kids in thirty days and then…
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Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin: Journalist, Abolitionist, Suffragist, Shin-Kicker
A hundred years ago, on August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, was ratified. A lot of us planned to celebrate, in public and out loud. Many of those celebrations have been postponed for a year so we can party like it’s 1920. Luckily, it’s easy to practice social…
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