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Special Report

Untold Stories of American History

Explore the lives of little-known changemakers who left their mark on the country


Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The American Yawp Vol. II: Since 1877, Getty Images
Wong Kim Ark's departure statement

How the Fight for Birthright Citizenship Shaped the History of Asian American Families

Frederick Douglass once said, “Samuel R. Ward has left no successor among the colored men amongst us, and it was a sad day for our cause when he was laid low in the soil of a foreign country.”

Frederick Douglass Thought This Abolitionist Was a 'Vastly Superior' Orator and Thinker

Woodrow Wilson and his second wife, Edith, in 1916

How Edith Wilson Kept Herself—and Her Husband—in the White House

More Stories

President John F. Kennedy meets with William Fitzjohn, Sierra Leone's charge d’affairs in Washington, in the Oval Office on April 27, 1961.

HISTORY

The African Diplomats Who Protested Segregation in the U.S.

Francine Uenuma

John H. Smith (left), mayor of Prichard, Alabama, unsuccessfully campaigned for the creation of an Africatown national park.

HISTORY

The Forgotten 1980s Battle to Preserve Africatown

Nick Tabor

The door of the 1,900-square-foot Nantucket fallout shelter

HISTORY

Inside JFK's Secret Doomsday Bunker

Jenn Morson

The 1923 Rosewood massacre resulted in the deaths of six Black people and two white vigilantes.

HISTORY

How History Forgot Rosewood, a Black Town Razed by a White Mob

Craig Pittman

In July 1827, residents of Boonsboro, Maryland, built the majority of the Washington Monument in just one day.

HISTORY

The Little-Known Story of the First Washington Monument

Dorvall Bedford

American ambassador Joseph C. Grew (left) meets with Japanese Foreign Minister Teijiro Toyoda (right) in October 1941, two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

HISTORY

The American Ambassador Who Tried to Prevent Pearl Harbor

Steve Kemper

Paula, Sam and Sol Messinger aboard the M.S. St. Louis in May 1939. The U.S. denied the ship entry, forcing its 937 passengers to return to Europe. More than a quarter of these refugees were later killed in the Holocaust.

HISTORY

Why Was America So Reluctant to Take Action on the Holocaust?

Jeanne Dorin McDowell

An inmate firefighter monitors flames as a house burns in the Napa wine region of California on October 9, 2017.

HISTORY

The History of California's Inmate Firefighter Program

Francine Uenuma

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