American History
“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…
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Hazel Ah Ying Lee: Chinese-American WASP
Hazel Ah Ying Lee was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1912. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants—the second of eight children. Lee was nineteen when she experienced her first flight, at the end of a friend’s flying lesson. She was hooked. She immediately began to save up the money for flying lessons from her…
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Strangers in the Land
I ended Asian-American Heritage Month with a Big Fat History Book: Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Michael Luo started thinking about writing such a history in the fall of 2016. He and his family were standing in front of a restaurant in Manhattan when a…
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