The West Virginia Mine Wars were a series of armed conflicts between coal mine operators and employees in the Mountain State. The first episode was about the conditions in the West Virginia coal fields in the years leading up to the Mine Wars.

This second episode in a three-part series focuses on the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek Strikes, during which martial law was declared three separate times. At least 20 people were killed.

The West Virginia Mine Wars were violent conflicts between mine workers and mine owners, that took place between 1912 and 1922. In all there were five armed battles over that 10-year period. This first episode in a three-part series focuses on the his...

John Robert Lewis was born on February 21, 1940, in Pike County, Alabama. As he learned during a filming of Finding Your Roots, his great-great-grandfather Tobias Carter, registered to voted in 1867, 2 years after the abolition of slavery.

The Civil War was supposed to mean the end of slavery and the beginning of freedom, franchise, and full citizenship for African Americans. And in the decades after the war, many blacks did make legislative, educational, and financial gains.

During the Revolutionary War, enslaved American James Armistead acted as a double agent and provided valuable information to French general Marquis de Lafayette. Five years after the war, Armistead was granted his freedom and added "Lafayette" to his ...

For enslaved Americans, literacy was a path to freedom. Those who could write forged the “tickets” that both enslaved and free blacks needed to move about. Some of these tickets took enslaved people all the way to free states, and even to Canada.

Throughout the South, it was illegal for white people to teach black people--enslaved and sometimes free--how to read.  Some whites taught blacks anyway: at times motivated by kindness, other times by self-interest.

Anti-literacy laws prevented millions of enslaved Americans from learning to read and write, and from chronicling their lives on paper. Thanks to oral history projects, however, not all of the stories of the enslaved are lost. And,

July 16, 1964 Dear Mr. Nelson, As you probably already know, there have been many arrests in Greenwood … Tomorrow I expect to be there to picket the jail house. This means almost certain arrest. Yours in freedom, Cephas During the summer of 1964,