Field trip: Alexandria African American Heritage Park

After (or before) you’ve read my article in the Cambridge Day about Harriet Jacobs and Imogen Willis Eddy, here are a few bits that could not make it in the original article.

In their own words: Two Black alumni from the Harvard College class of 1897.

What to the slave is the Fourth of July? asked Frederick Douglass to a Rochester audience. What indeed?

Consider the challenge of an escape from slavery via the watery depths.

Have you heard of 19th century composer Augusta Browne? Biographer Bonny Miller sheds some light, and sound, on what Browne achieved amidst a lot of constraints.

The post-Civil War work of the Freedmen’s Bureau was curtailed from the start.

As I get vaccinated for COVID-19, I remembered that a Civil War smallpox vaccination campaign had its hiccups.

In this second post about Pfaff’s, a 19th century Bohemian hang-out in New York City, I look at five women who wrote.

For about five years, in the last 1850s and early 1860s, Pfaff’s was the place to be. Who were the women there?

The lives of Margaret Fuller, Mathew Brady, and Edgar Allen Poe—in a compressed bit of Manhattan and a compressed bit of time.

Will the 10 remaining Army bases named for Confederates finally be renamed? As of mid-December, the bill awaits the president’s signing or veto.

Harriet Jacobs started a school in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1864. It wasn’t easy.

Starting the school year—the 1844-45 school year, that is.

The Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, the group that sponsored Frederick Douglass’s famous July 4 speech, raised money, held lectures, hid fugitives—and remembered to serve refreshments at their monthly meetings.

When I moderated a History Author talk on Zoom, I spoke with two authors with very different ways to approach the topic of women in the Civil War.

Harriet Jacobs hid in an enclosure 9 feet by 7 feet in Edenton, NC, which we visited last week.

Connecting Bostonians William Cooper Nell and Lydia Maria Child with Harriet Jacobs.

A presentation by Fran Bromberg about the creation, forgetting, and rededication of the cemetery on South Washington Street

Fortunately, a much calmer boat ride to Nats Park from the Alexandria waterfront last week than in October 1862.