History (4,531 posts)

On more than thirty occasions between 1776 and 1779, American men and women gathered in crowds to confront hoarding merchants, intimidate “unreasonable” storekeepers, and seize scarce commodities ranging from sugar to tea to bread. A good-sized minority of the crowds we know about consisted largely of women; a few others may have included men and women alike. Each crowd voiced specific local grievances, but it is clear that their participants sometimes knew of actions elsewhere and viewed each episode as part of a wider drama.

At its height, the National Welfare Rights Organization had more than 25,000 dues-paying members. Some people have called it “the largest black feminist organization in American history.”

Four members of the Mattachine Society at a “sip-in” in 1966, demanding to be served at Julius’s Bar in Greenwich Village

Leah Greenberg Postcard Collection, College of Charleston Special Collections

Sumiko Shigematsu, standing at left, looking at row of women seated at sewing machines (1943)

Many 19th-century observers were disturbed by the way young people took the co-ed sport of croquet as an opportunity to flirt.

The Berlin Wall, November 1989

Sylvia Pankhurst at work on the Women’s Social Defence League shop in Bow Street, London, October 11, 1912.

Many of the babies were put in children’s homes, such as Holnicote House in Somerset

This article examines how Liverpool Borough Prison, opened in 1855 as one of the largest local prisons in England to adopt the separate system, categorized and dealt with mental distress and disorder amongst its prison population in the late nineteenth century.

Jane Shallice examines the history of radical research at the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science

There are more than 2,000 playgrounds spread across New York City. Ariel Aberg-Riger explores the creative and political history of concrete jungle’s jungle gyms.

Father Flanagan talking with children in his hometown of Ballymoe, Ireland, in 1946.

Thomas Verner Moore (1877–1969), a Catholic priest, psychologist, and psychiatrist, developed a Catholic psychiatry in the first half of the 20th century.

The former Bethlehem Steel office building in Sparrows Point lies in ruins.

Group of Workers in Clayton, N.C. Cotton Mills, October 1912

Ironton, Ohio, 1985.

Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929 assembles a wide array of Library of Congress source materials from the 1920s that document the widespread prosperity of the Coolidge years, the nation’s transition to a mass consumer economy, and the role of government in this transition.