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
Ann Mitchell is set to perform Suffragettes UNITE! at the 2019 KeyBank Rochester Fringe Festival on Thursday, September 19th, at 6:30 pm at the The Avyarium Theatre (274 Goodman St. N. Suite D242 – located at The Village Gate, Entrance B – 2nd floor). 
Neighborhoods change. Ours was changing when my single parent mom managed to buy 
I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood close to downtown Rochester, New York in the 1950s. People displaced during the Second World War, along with migrants from the American South and Puerto Rico, were the newest arrivals to my part of the city (settled by Europeans in the last decades of the 19th century).
Susan Peterson Gateley’s new novel The Widow Maker, A Maritime Tale of Lake Ontario (Whiskey Hill Press, 2019) looks at the story of a female Lake Ontario sailor’s political enlightenment in the time of Rochester’s Susan B. Anthony, Oswego’s Dr. Mary Walker and Auburn’s Harriet Tubman.
Baseball is our innocent pastime. Marked by stateliness and decorum, the game largely excludes the messiness and cruelty of the outside world. Saturday, July 25, 1959, was one of those rare occasions when history intruded on the grassy diamond. That evening, the simple game of pitching, hitting, and fielding became entangled with revolution, gunfire, and cold war politics.
To celebrate the anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s 200th birthday, Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives has published a Frederick Douglass Bicentennial Curriculum.
The William G. Pomeroy Foundation is offering grants to Historical Societies and Historical Museums in NYS with annual budgets of $50,000 or less to attend the Museum Association of New York’s (MANY) annual conference being held April 8 – 10, 2018 in Rochester.
The complete program for the April 20-22 PhotoHistory/PhotoFuture conference in Rochester has been announced.