Everyone knows the name Amelia Earhart. But the other four women in O’Brien’s story were, in some cases, better pilots and their stories are no less compelling. O’Brien recounts for us the amazing exploits of Ruth Elder, the first American woman try to fly across the Atlantic Ocean after Lindbergh’s feat in 1927; Ruth Nichols, […]

Mark Twain had a school-boy declare: ‘Homer was not written by Homer, but by another man of that name’ – which suggests that the myth of the author endures, despite scholarly attempts to debunk it. The earliest sources that mention Homer by name date to the sixth century BCE: from them we can establish that […]

Sixty-six years after his lynching, the story of Emmett Till is more prominent than ever. Beginning with the murder in 1955, Dave Tell will chart the long after-life of Emmett Till. Tell will explain how and why Till’s story was buried for 49 years before roaring back to life in the twenty-first century. Tell will […]

Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, to enslaved parents during the tumult of the Civil War, Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) joined a generation of young Black men and women who aspired to professional careers and successful lives as full citizens in the decades after Reconstruction. Following her parents’ tragic deaths during the 1878 yellow fever epidemic, […]