Weird History
What the South Was Like During Reconstruction
On April 15, 1865, Lincoln was gunned down in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth, a man sympathetic to the defeated Confederacy. In the years following the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, his successor Andrew Johnson...
Curated Video
The Little Rock Nine: Separate and Unequal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in the United States that permitted segregation in everything water fountains to buses to schools. Services were definitely separate in the United States in the first half of the 20th century, but...
Curated Video
Della Reese: the First Black Woman to Host a Talk Show
Decades before Oprah, Della Reese was the first Black Woman to host a talk show. Born in Michigan in 1931, Della Reese began making records and performing on television variety shows in the 1950s. Reese was the first black woman to host...
Curated Video
Benedita Souza Da Silva Sampaio
Benedita Souza Da Silva Sampaio is Brazilian politician and the first-ever female and Black person to become governor of Rio. She's a figure that reinforces racial equality for the blacks of Latin America.
Curated Video
Mary Fields aka Stagecoach Mary
Mary Fields, also known as Stagecoach Mary and Black Mary, was the first African-American female star-route mail carrier in the United States. Born Mary Fields in around 1832, Fields was born into slavery, and like many other enslaved...
Curated Video
Sister Rosetta Tharpe
Sister Rosetta Tharpe was one of the most influential artists of the 20th Century born on the 20th March 1915 in Arkansas, U.S. She was a talented singer, songwriter, and recording artist who attained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s...
Curated Video
The Man Who Planned to Make Antigua an African State
Do you know about the great Prince Klaas? In 1704, 10-year-old Kwaku nicknamed Prince Klaas was captured from Ghana during the Eguafo Civil war and was shipped to the Caribbean where he was purchased by a rich sugar planter. At that...
Curated Video
Frederick Douglass: The Journey to Freedom
This video tells the inspiring story of Frederick Douglass, born into slavery in 1818, who taught himself to read and write and eventually escaped to the North. The video also covers Douglass's life after slavery, which included writing...
Curated Video
Ellen and William Craft: The Journey to Freedom
This video tells the story of Ellen and William Craft's daring escape from slavery, which included Ellen's disguise as a white man. The video also covers their life in England, where they fleed to avoid re-enslavement and to start their...
Step Back History
The Jamaican Maroons: Mutual Aid to Escape Slavery
The Atlantic colonial world is full of resistance to the brutal enslavement and displacement of BIPOC. Often escaping oppression meant forging pockets of resistance to live and fight for their freedom. These people are known as maroons,...
Curated Video
Anna Arnold Hedgeman
Anna Arnold grew up in Anoka, Minnesota. Even though veryone was white except her family, she did not experience segretation growing up. However, when she went out into the world, she found that she had to fight for people to see her and...
Brainwaves Video Anthology
Steven S. Rogers - Successful Black Entrepreneurs
Steven Rogers retired from Harvard Business School (HBS) in 2019 where he was the “MBA Class of 1957 Senior Lecturer” in General Management. He taught Entrepreneurial Finance and a new course that he created, titled “Black Business...
Curated Video
Robert Smalls: The Journey to Freedom
This videos tells the story of Robert Smalls, a man who escaped slavery by captaining a Confederate-owned ship and handing it over to the Union. He went on to serve in the US Navy through the end of the war. The video concludes with...
Curated Video
Doris Miller: Hero of Pearl Harbour
Doris Miller was a United States Navy cook third class who was killed in action during World War II. He was the first Black American to be awarded the Navy Cross. In this episode, we take a brief look at his heroic life and his amazing...
Curated Video
What are Sundown Towns?
A sundown or sunset town was a city, town or neighborhood in the US that excluded non-whites after dark. The term sundown came from the signs that were posted at the towns borders stating "Negro, Don't Let the Sun Set On You Here." A...
Curated Video
Harriet Jacobs: The Journey to Freedom
This video tells the life story of Harriet Jacobs, the writer of "Life of a Slave Girl." The video details her childhood and her yearslong journey to be reunited with her children, who were sold to slaveowners in different states. It...
Curated Video
Harriet Tubman part 6: A Heroine On and Off the Battlefield
The final part of this series details Harriet's experiences with the miltary during the Civil War, during which she became the first woman in the US to lead a major military operation. It concludes with stories of her life after the war,...
Curated Video
Harriet Tubman part 3: The Underground Railroad
The third video in this series covers Harriet's experiences being a conductor for the Underground Railroad. It provides details of some of the people she rescued, how she made so many trips on her own, and those who helped her along the...
Curated Video
Benjamin Banneker: Time Lord
Benjamin Banneker was a self-taught mathematician, astronomer, compiler of almanacs, a writer, an inventor and the man who may have completed the design for Washington DC Capitol City of the United States of America from memory. Banneker...
Curated Video
Harriet Tubman part 2: The Escape
The second video in this series details Harriet's escape from slavery. It also explains how other slaves made their own escapes. Lastly, the video describes Harriet's desperate attempts to free her family and others, which led to her...
Curated Video
Harriet Tubman part 1: The Early Years
The first video in this series covers Harriet Tubman's childhood and early adulthood. It provides details of her life as a slave and what led to her escape to freedom.
PBS
Literary Icons You NEED to Know From the Harlem Renaissance (feat. Princess Weekes)
Novels like Passing by Nella Larsen, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and the poetry of Langston Hughes were all written during this period and have become important pieces of the American literary canon. Still, when...
Curated Video
Harriet Tubman part 5: Working with John Brown
The fifth video in this series covers Harriet's support of John Brown's plans for an uprising against the South. While other abolitionists refused to help, Harriet helped to recruit men to be a part of what would be a failed raid.
Curated Video
Yasuke: the Forgotten African Samurai
There is a Japanese proverb which says “For a Samurai to be brave, he must have a bit of black blood.” Yasuke first appears in history in 1579 as an attendant of the Jesuit missionary Alessandro Valignano coming to Japan to visit the...