Unsung History
158 episodes - English - Latest episode: 15 days ago - ★★★★★ - 72 ratingsA podcast about people and events in American history you may not know much about. Yet.
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Episodes
The Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village
June 13, 2022 17:19 - 51 minutes - 47.6 MBThe 12-story Women’s House of Detention, situated in the heart of Greenwich Village in New York City, from 1932 to 1974, was central to the queer history of The Village. The House of D, as it was known, housed such inmates as Angela Davis, Afeni Shakur, Andrea Dworkin, and Valerie Solanas, and was formative in their thinking and writing. On the night of the Stonewall Riots, the incarcerated women and transmaculine people in the House of D, a few hundred feet away from The Stonewall Inn, join...
The Queer History of the Women's Suffrage Movement
June 06, 2022 17:42 - 40 minutes - 37.2 MBQueer suffragists were central to the women’s suffrage movement in the United States from its earliest days. However, in a movement that placed great importance on public image in service of the goal of achieving the vote, queer suffragists who pushed the boundaries of “respectability” were sometimes ostracized, and others hid their queerness, or had it erased by others. Joining me to help us learn about queer suffragists is historian Dr. Wendy Rouse, Associate Professor in History at San J...
Chinese Grocery Stores in the Mississippi Delta
May 30, 2022 17:15 - 43 minutes - 39.5 MBDuring Reconstruction, cotton planters in the Mississippi Delta recruited Chinese laborers to work on their plantations, to replace the emancipated slaves who had previously done the hard labor. However, the Chinese workers quickly learned that they couldn’t earn enough money picking cotton to send back to their families, and they turned instead to running small grocery stores, filling a niche in the market of the Deep South. At one point, the city of Greenville, Mississippi, had 40,000 resi...
Patsy Mink
May 23, 2022 14:42 - 50 minutes - 46.7 MBIn Patsy Mink’s first term in Congress in 1965, she was one of only 11 women serving in the US House of Representatives, and she was the first woman of color to ever serve in Congress. Mink was no stranger to firsts, being the first Japanese-American woman licensed to practice law in Hawaii, after being one of only two women in her graduating class at the University of Chicago Law School. She would later be the first Asian American to run for President. Mink leaned on her own experiences o...
The US-Born Japanese Americans (Nisei) who Migrated to Japan
May 16, 2022 16:29 - 46 minutes - 42.3 MBIn the decades before World War II, 50,000 of the US-born children of Japanese immigrants (a quarter of their total population) migrated from the United States to the Japanese Empire. Although these second generation Japanese Americans (called Nisei) were US citizens, they faced prejudice and discrimination in the US and went to Japan in search of a better life. Joining me to help us learn about the Nisei who returned to Japan, what motivated them, and the challenges they faced both in Jap...
Thai Americans & the Rise of Thai Food in the United States
May 09, 2022 15:58 - 47 minutes - 43 MBThere are around 300,000 Thai Americans but almost 5,000 Thai restaurants in the United States. To understand how Thai restaurants became so ubiquitous in the US, we dive into the history of how Thai cuisine arrived in the US before Thai immigrants started to arrive in large numbers, and how Thai Americans capitalized on the popularity of their food to find their niche in the US economy. I’m joined in this episode by Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at the University ...
Mary Paik Lee
May 02, 2022 17:38 - 47 minutes - 43.2 MBMary Paik Lee (Paik Kuang Sun) was born in the Korean Empire on August 17, 1900, and was baptized by American Presbyterian minister Dr. Samuel Austin Moffett, one of the first American Presbyterian missionaries to come to Korea. In 1905, her family left Korea for Hawaii, fleeing the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula. Late in her life, Mary wrote a memoir, recounting her family’s struggles in Hawaii and then California, where they faced discrimination and poverty, all while striving...
French Fashion in Gilded Age America
April 25, 2022 16:59 - 42 minutes - 39 MBParis has a long history as the fashion capital of the world. In the late 19th Century, American women, like European women, wanted the latest in French fashion. The wealthiest women traveled to Paris regularly to visit their favorite couturiers, like the House of Worth and Maison Félix, to update their wardrobes. For those women who couldn’t afford to travel, Paris came to them, via international expositions, magazines, and department stores. I’m joined in this episode by art historian Dr...
The Cabinet
April 18, 2022 17:40 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBToday, when Americans think of it at all, they take for granted the institution of The Cabinet, the heads of the executive departments and other advisors who meet with the President around a big mahogany table in the White House. But how did The Cabinet come into being? It’s not established in the Constitution, and the writers of The Constitution were explicitly opposed to creating a private executive advisory body. I’m joined in this episode by presidential historian Dr. Lindsay M. Chervin...
The Abolition Movement of the 1830s
April 11, 2022 18:07 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBFrom the founding of the United States, there were people who opposed slavery, but many who grappled with the concept, including slave owner Thomas Jefferson, envisioned a plan of gradual emancipation for the country. In 1817, after the establishment of the American Colonization Society, free Blacks in Philadelphia and elsewhere began to fight for immediate abolition for all enslaved people in the United States. By the 1830s, they were joined in these efforts by white allies. Although not a...
The 1913 Ascent of Denali
April 04, 2022 17:12 - 42 minutes - 39.2 MBIn June 1913, a group of four men ascended to the peak of Denali, the first humans known to have reached the highest point in North America. In a time before ultra lightweight and high-tech equipment, Hudson Stuck, Harry Karstens, Robert Tatum, and Walter Harper had to haul heavy loads of food and supplies and books up the mountain with them, battling fire and clearing away earthquake debris along the way. After nearly two months of expedition, they finally stood atop the world. I’m joined ...
Cordelia Dodson Hood
March 28, 2022 17:31 - 44 minutes - 41 MBWhen German troops invaded Austria in 1938, Cordelia Dodson was visiting Vienna, living with her siblings as they studied German, attended the opera, and marched with Austrian students protesting against Hitler. Even with this experience, Cordelia may have settled into academic life in the United States, but when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the US entered the war, she felt called to serve her country. In a decades-long career in Europe, Cordelia Dodson Hood combined her linguistic skill, h...
The National Women's Football League
March 21, 2022 15:53 - 40 minutes - 36.8 MBIn 1967, a Cleveland talent agent named Sid Friedman decided to capitalize on the popularity of football in the rust belt by launching a women’s football league, which he envisioned as entertainment, complete with mini-skirts and tear-away jerseys. The women he recruited had other ideas, and soon they were playing competitive tackle football, not in skirts but in football uniforms. In 1974, the owners of several teams around the country, some from Friedman’s WPFL and some independent of it...
Babe Didrikson Zaharias
March 14, 2022 15:33 - 51 minutes - 47.1 MBBorn in 1911, Mildred Ella Didrikson Zaharias, who went by the nickname “Babe,” was a phenomenal, and confident athlete. Babe won Olympic gold in track and field, was an All American player in basketball, pitched in exhibition games in Major League Baseball, and won 17 straight women’s amateur golf tournaments, before turning pro and co-founding the LPGA.In a society that didn’t welcome women like Babe, she nonetheless forged her own path and won the hearts of fans along the way. I’m joined...
Yellowstone National Park
March 07, 2022 17:26 - 57 minutes - 52.5 MBOne hundred fifty years ago, President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act establishing Yellowstone National Park into law, making it the first national park in the United States, and a cause for celebration in a country still recovering from the devastating Civil War. Not everyone celebrated, though, including Native Americans who had called the land home for thousands of years before white trappers and explorers first experienced the wild majesty of the landscape. To learn more about the men ...
Freedpeople in Indian Territory
February 28, 2022 18:41 - 39 minutes - 35.8 MBWhen the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee (or Creek), and Seminole Nations – known as “The Five Civilized Tribes” by white settlers – were forcibly moved from their lands in the Southeastern United States to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma), they brought their possessions with them, including the people of African descent whom they had enslaved. After the Civil War, these slaves were freed and freedpeople were included in the allocation of Native lands undertaken by the Dawes C...
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
February 21, 2022 18:30 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBNOTE: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's story includes acts of sexual violence. Listeners may wish to skip past the introduction to avoid this content. Poet, essayist, and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson is perhaps best known as the widow of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, but she is a remarkable figure in her own right. Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who had only recently been freed from slavery and an unknown father, Alice graduated from Straight University (later Dillard University), became a te...
The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion
February 14, 2022 16:46 - 39 minutes - 36.2 MBOn February 14, 1945, after crossing the Atlantic Ocean and surviving a run-in with a Nazi U-Boat, the women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion disembarked the Île-de-France in Glasgow, Scotland. The task awaiting the only all-Black, all-female battalion overseas during World War II was daunting. There were airplane hangars filled with a backlog of millions of pieces of mail sitting in Birmingham, England, addressed from friends and family to service members stationed across ...
Julia Chinn
February 07, 2022 16:14 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MBJulia Chinn was born into slavery in Kentucky at the tail end of the 18th Century. Despite laws against interracial marriage, Richard Mentor Johnson, the ninth Vice President of the United States, called Julia Chinn his wife, and he recognized their daughters together as his. Johnson left Julia in charge of his Blue Spring Farm when he was away in DC for months at a time, and Julia ran the household and plantation, managed the business affairs, and worked as both manager and nurse at the Cho...
Who was Carol Lane?
January 31, 2022 17:56 - 48 minutes - 44.7 MBIn fall 1947 the Shell Oil Company hired a Women’s Travel Director named Carol Lane, who served in the role until she retired in 1974. Lane’s job was to encourage women to travel, showing them the joys of touring the country by car. Lane herself traveled around the United States and Canada, speaking to women’s clubs and on radio and TV, giving travel tips and packing demonstrations. Eventually, she even awarded women who developed local travel safety programs with the Carol Lane Award. So w...
The Amerikadeutscher Volksbund & the Newark Minutemen in the 1930s
January 24, 2022 16:00 - 46 minutes - 42.3 MBThe rise of Nazism before World War II wasn’t limited to Germany. The German-Americna Bund (Amerikadeutscher Volksbund) formed in Buffalo, New York, in 1936, to promote a favorable view of Nazi Germany. It quickly grew to 70 local groups around the country, with 20 training camps where kids aged 8-18 practiced military drills and wore Nazi-style uniforms. By 1939, 20,000 people attended the Bund’s Pro American Rally in Madison Square Garden. When Prohibition ended in 1933, Jewish American g...
Mary Ann Shadd Cary
January 17, 2022 18:24 - 40 minutes - 36.8 MBMary Ann Shadd Cary, born in Delaware in 1823, was a teacher, a writer, an abolitionist, a suffragist, and a lawyer, and is considered to be the first Black woman to publish and edit a newspaper in North America, The Provincial Freeman. When abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked readers of his newspaper in 1848 for suggestions on how to improve life for African Americans, Shadd Cary answered: “We should do more and talk less,” and she spent her life following that motto in both the United St...
The 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike
January 10, 2022 16:12 - 57 minutes - 52.6 MBIn February, 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, a small group of unionized workers at the Electric Auto-Lite company of Toledo, Ohio, went on strike. When management failed to sign a promised contract by the April 1 deadline, more workers went on strike. And this time they had help from the Unemployed League. What started as a small walkout turned into a massive demonstration by 10,000 strikers, and a battle with the Ohio National Guard, and is now regarded as one of the most import...
The Suffrage Road Trip of 1915
January 03, 2022 16:34 - 36 minutes - 33.2 MBIn September 1915, four suffragists set off from the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California, in a brand-new Overland 6 convertible to make the 3,000-mile drive across the country to deliver a petition for women’s suffrage to President Woodrow Wilson on the opening day of Congress in December. Along the way they faced illness, terrible driving conditions, and opposition to women’s suffrage. Joining me to help us learn more about the road trip, and especially th...
Women-Led Slave Revolts
December 27, 2021 16:00 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBEnslaved Africans in what is now New York State and in the Middle Passage resisted their enslavement, despite the risk of doing so. In the previously accepted history of these slave revolts, the assumption was that men led the resistance, but Dr. Rebecca Hall dug deeper into the records and read against the grain to find the women warriors who fought for their freedom. Joining me to help us learn more is Dr. Rebecca Hall, a scholar, activist and educator, who writes and speaks on the histor...
The Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II
December 20, 2021 17:52 - 39 minutes - 35.8 MBFrom September 1942 to December 1944, over 1000 American women served in the war effort as Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), flying 80% of all ferrying missions and delivering 12,652 aircraft of 78 types. They also transported cargo, test flew planes, demoed aircraft that the male pilots were scared to fly, simulated missions, and towed targets for live anti-aircraft artillery practice. The WASP did not fly in combat missions, but their work was dangerous, and 38 were killed in accidents...
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee
December 13, 2021 17:47 - 46 minutes - 42.5 MBMabel Ping-Hua Lee was born in China in 1896 but lived most of her life in the United States, where, due to the Chinese Exclusion Act, she had no path to naturalization until the law changed in 1943. Even though it would not benefit her for decades, Mabel Lee worked for women’s suffrage, leading the New York City Suffrage Parade on horseback at the age of only 16. Lee was the first Chinese woman to earn a PhD in Economics in the United States, graduating from Columbia University in 1921 with...
Loïs Mailou Jones
December 06, 2021 16:55 - 32 minutes - 30.1 MBBorn in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1905, artist Loïs Mailou Jones’s career spanned much of the 20th Century as both a painter and a teacher of generations of Black artists at Howard University. Jones faced racial discrimination in the US throughout much of her long life, and found refuge and inspiration in the Harlem Renaissance Movement and in the expatriate community of Black artists in Paris. Her 1953 marriage to Haitian artist Louis Vergniaud Pierre-Noel, and later research trips to Afri...
The Yakama War
November 29, 2021 17:26 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBn October 1805, the Yakama encountered the Lewis and Clark Expedition near the confluence of the Yakima and Columbia rivers. By fifty years later, so many European and American trappers, traders, and eventually, settlers, had arrived in the area, putting demands on the land and resources, that federal government officials called a council meeting with the local tribal nations to negotiate a treaty by which the native people would move on to reservations in exchange for federal benefits. Th...
The Wampanoag & the Thanksgiving Myth
November 22, 2021 15:17 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MBIn Autumn of 1621, a group of Pilgrims from the Mayflower voyage and Wampanoag men, led by their sachem Massasoit, ate a feast together. The existence of that meal, which held little importance to either the Pilgrims or the Wampanoag, is the basis of the Thanksgiving myth. The myth, re-told in school Thanksgiving pageants and TV shows, is not accurate and is harmful to Native people, especially to the Wampanoag. In 1970, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts planned a banquet to celebrate the ...
Treaty Rights of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe
November 15, 2021 16:39 - 41 minutes - 38.1 MBBefore the arrival of Europeans, the Ojibwe nation occupied much of the Lake Superior region, including what is now Ontario in Canada and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in the United States. In 1850, President Zachary Taylor’s administration, in response to demands from European Americans, planned to force the Ojibwe of Wisconsin west of the Mississippi in violation of signed treaties. They planned to bring the Ojibwe to Minnesota from Wisconsin in late fall so that they would have to s...
Alaska Territorial Guard in World War II
November 08, 2021 13:00 - 39 minutes - 35.7 MBPrior to World War II, most of the US military deemed the territory of Alaska as militarily unimportant, to the point where the Alaska National Guard units were stationed instead in Washington state in August of 1941. That changed when the Japanese invaded and occupied two Alaskan islands in June of 1942. The US government responded first by evacuating Unangax̂ villagers and forcibly interning them in Southeast Alaska in facilities without plumbing or electricity for two years where many d...
The Stockbridge-Munsee Community & their Removal History
November 01, 2021 17:52 - 43 minutes - 40.1 MBThe Stockbridge-Munsee Community, the People of the Waters that Are Never Still, were forced to move many times after they first encountered Europeans. In 1609, Dutch trader Henry Hudson sailed up the Mahicannituck, the River that Flows Both Ways, into Mohican land. By 1614 there was a Dutch trading post established on a nearby island to take advantage of the beaver and otter availability. The arrival of the Europeans changed the economic pattern of the Mohicans, and brought both disease an...
Fashion, Feminism, and the New Woman of the late 19th Century
October 25, 2021 15:46 - 39 minutes - 36.4 MBThe late 19th Century ushered in an evolution in women’s fashion from the Victorian “True Woman” whose femininity was displayed in wide skirts and petticoats, the “New Woman” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was modern and youthful in a shirtwaist and bell-shaped skirt. Earlier fashion experimentation by feminists in the mid-19th Century had failed to catch on and had interfered with their ability to inspire change as they were labeled radical for their sartorial choices. Feminists...
The Original Fight for the Equal Rights Amendment
October 18, 2021 14:00 - 41 minutes - 37.7 MBAfter the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, enfranchising (some) women, lots of questions remained. If women could vote, could they serve on juries? Could they hold public office? What about the array of state-laws that still privileged husbands and fathers over wives and daughters in regard to property and earnings rights? In February 1921, Alice Paul, head of the National Woman’s Party declared: “Now that political freedom has been won, we hope to wipe out sex discrimination in law, s...
Zitkála-Šá
October 11, 2021 16:10 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBWriter, musician, and political activist Zitkála-Šá, also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was born on February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where she lived until she was eight. When Zitkála-Šá was eight years old, missionaries came to the reservation to recruit children to go to White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute. Despite her mother’s pleading, Zitkála-Šá begged to go to the school with her older brother. She later wrote that she regretted the decision ...
Women in the U.S. Military during the Cold War
October 04, 2021 17:50 - 39 minutes - 36.2 MBNearly 350,000 American women served in the US military during World War II. Although the women in the military didn’t engage in combat their presence was vital to the American effort, in clerical work as well as in driving trucks, operating radios and telephones, repairing and flying planes, and of course, in nursing. Women’s active duty was a temporary wartime measure, but when the war ended, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and General Omar Bradley, among other...
Freedom Suits in Maryland & DC, 1790-1864
September 27, 2021 15:28 - 42 minutes - 39 MBSlavery was legal in Maryland until November 1, 1864, when a new state constitution prohibited the practice of slavery. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation the year before had declared slaves in the Confederate states to be free, but Maryland was in the union and not included in the proclamation. From the late 18th Century until the Civil War, enslaved families in Prince George’s County, Maryland, brought over a thousand legal suits against hundreds of slaveholding families, arguing for thei...
Chef Lena Richard
September 20, 2021 15:00 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBOver a decade before Julia Child’s The French Chef appeared on TV, a Black woman chef hosted her own, very popular cooking show on WDSU-TV in New Orleans. At a time when families were just beginning to own televisions, Chef Lena Richard’s show was so popular that it aired twice a week. Richard started working as a cook as a teenager for the wealthy Vairin family who employed her mom as a domestic servant. When their cook left, Alice Vairin gave Richard a trial run as cook and was so impress...
African American AIDS Activism
September 13, 2021 15:06 - 44 minutes - 41.1 MBAccording to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), in 2018, 13% of the US population was Black and African American, but 42% of new HIV diagnoses in the US were from Black and African American people. This discrepancy is not new. On June 5, 1981, the CDC first published an article in its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) titled “Pneumocystis Pneumonia” that suggested that there might be “a cellular-immune dysfunction related to a common exposure that predispo...
The Coors Boycott
September 06, 2021 17:00 - 43 minutes - 39.8 MBIn the mid-1960s, to protest discriminatory hiring practices, Chicano groups in Colorado called for a boycott of the Coors Brewing Company, launching what would become a decades-long boycott that brought together a coalition of activists that would include not just Chicano and Latino groups, but also African American groups, union organizers, LGBT activists, students, environmentalists and feminists. These groups had a variety of motivations for their involvement in the boycott and varied s...
Phrenology & Crime in 19th Century America
August 30, 2021 16:00 - 43 minutes - 39.6 MBIn Nineteenth Century America there was a strong reformist push to know and improve the self. One key tactic Americans used to learn more about themselves was phrenological readings. They would pay practical phrenologists, like Orson Squire Fowler and his younger brother, Lorenzo Niles Fowler for readings of their skulls or their children’s skulls. In Lorenzo Fowler’s reading of Emily Sawyer, he concluded a thirteen-page analysis by saying: “Cultivate as much as you can the organs marked s...
Chesapeake Bay Pirates & the 19th Century Oyster Wars
August 23, 2021 16:00 - 33 minutes - 30.2 MBIn Chesapeake Bay in the late 19th century, oyster harvesting was a big business. There were so many oyster harvesters harvesting so many oysters that the legislatures of Maryland and Virginia had to start regulating who could harvest oysters and how they could do so. Creating the regulations was the easy part; enforcing them was much harder. The illegal harvesting of oysters by oyster pirates continued, even after the creation of the Maryland State Oyster Police Force in 1868 and a similar ...
Prohibition in the 1850s
August 16, 2021 15:00 - 39 minutes - 36.2 MBPopular depictions of prohibition in the United States usually show the speakeasies, bootleggers, flappers, and bathtub gin of the Roaring Twenties, but earlier attempts at prohibition stretch back far into the 19th century. In 1851, Maine passed the first statewide prohibition law, and 12 other states quickly followed as temperance societies preached the evils of alcohol. Anti-prohibitionists, especially liquor dealers and hotel owners, decried the “tyranny of the majority” and fought back...
The Nativist Riots of Philadelphia in 1844
August 09, 2021 17:00 - 41 minutes - 37.8 MBIn May of 1844, growing tensions between nativists and Irish Catholic immigrants in Philadelphia erupted into violence in the streets of the Irish Catholic Kensington district, prompted in part by a disagreement over whether the King James Bible should be read in public schools. A citizen posse called by county sheriff Morton McMichael was unable to quell the violence, and the local state militia, under the command of General George Cadwalader stepped in to help, as homes and churches were ...
The Philadelphia Riots of 1844
August 09, 2021 17:00 - 41 minutes - 28.3 MBIn May of 1844, growing tensions between nativists and Irish Catholic immigrants in Philadelphia erupted into violence in the streets of the Irish Catholic Kensington district, prompted in part by a disagreement over whether the King James Bible should be read in public schools. A citizen posse called by county sheriff Morton McMichael was unable to quell the violence, and the local state militia, under the command of General George Cadwalader stepped in to help, as homes and churches were ...
Elizabeth Packard
August 02, 2021 17:00 - 35 minutes - 32.7 MBElizabeth Packard was born in Massachusetts in 1816 into a comfortable home where her parents were able to provide for her education. She taught briefly at a girls’ school before at age 23 agreeing at her parents’ urging to marry 37-year-old Calvinist minister Theophilus Packard. Over the next 20 years Elizabeth was a devoted mother and housewife who grew the family’s vegetables and sewed clothes for their six children. To the outside world, it appeared to be a contented marriage, until Eli...
Mary Mallon (The Sad & Complicated Story of "Typhoid Mary")
July 26, 2021 18:00 - 44 minutes - 40.8 MBMary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, immigrated from Northern Ireland to New York City at age 15, around 1883. She found work as a cook, a well paying job for an immigrant woman and worked for number of different families in the early 20th Century. In March 1907, civil engineer George Soper burst into the kitchen of the home where she was cooking and told her that she was spreading typhoid via her cooking. He demanded samples of her feces, urine, and blood to test. Mallon, who bel...
Mary Mallon (The Sad & Complicated Story of the Real Typhoid Mary)
July 26, 2021 18:00 - 44 minutes - 30.5 MBMary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, immigrated from Northern Ireland to New York City, at age 15, around 1883. She found work as a cook, a relatively well paying job for an immigrant woman and worked for number of different families in the early 20th Century. In March of 1907, a civil engineer named George Soper burst into the kitchen of the home where she was cooking and told her that she was spreading typhoid via her cooking. He demanded samples of her feces, urine, and blood t...
Migrant Incarceration and the 1985 El Centro Hunger Strike
July 19, 2021 15:00 - 33 minutesIn 1945, United States immigration officials opened the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp in El Centro, California, to be an administrative holding center for unauthorized Mexican migrants, many of whom had been working on local farms and ranches. From the beginning, migrants were often detained for long periods of time while they served as the unpaid labor force of the center. Conditions were poor in the facility in the decades that followed, and in 1985 the incarcerated migrants (by this...