I offer the following tribute to Anna Douglass, first wife of Frederick Douglass and mother of their five children, on the anniversary of her death Aug. 4, 1882:
Both Frederick Bailey and Anna Murray were born in rural Maryland in the early 1800s and grew up under harsh racist customs that strictly defined roles for men and women by sex, race and class.
By the time Frederick and Anna met in the 1830s in Baltimore, his owner valued him as a slave who was a skilled caulker. Yet Anna, despite being a free woman skilled as a domestic and cook, was not well paid by her white employers. [Read more…] about Anna Murray-Douglass: Frederick’s Most Important Ally
The Underground Railroad Coalition 
The organization Monumental Women has announced that actors Jane Alexander, Viola Davis, America Ferrera, Rita Moreno, Zoe Saldana and Meryl Streep will portray Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in English and Spanish-Language ‘Talking Statues’ monologues that will accompany the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument.
The new children’s book Jacob Riis’s Camera: Bringing Light to Tenement Children (Calkins Creek, 2020) by Alexis O’Neill and illustrated by Gary Kelley, is a revealing biography of a pioneering photojournalist and social reformer Jacob Riis, showcasing how he brought to light one of the worst social justice issues plaguing 
The “Man with the Muck Rake” appears in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as a person who only looks down gathering filth. His vision is fixed on carnal, not on spiritual matters. By seeking out what is disagreeable, he is blind to divine grace.
In the course of the nineteenth century, powerful and relatively stable explosives were developed. Dynamite became synonymous with radicalism and the moniker “dynamitist” preceded that of terrorist.
Charles Evans Hughes and Al Jolson shared a small stage at Marion, Ohio in 1920 as part of Republican presidential candidate Warren Harding’s “front porch” campaign.
The 
In 1912, investigative journalist Alfred Henry Lewis published The Apaches of New York, an anecdotal narrative of notorious gangs in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
During the Civil War personal identification of soldiers killed and severely wounded in combat was daunting, because of inadequate record keeping in both the Union and the Confederate armies.