"There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made… I had the feeling that the…
No one knows, or will ever fully understand, why Caroline Henderson, nee Boa, daughter of a prosperous Iowa farmer, graduate of Mount Holyoke College in…
Sometimes the best plans go awry, and for intrepid female Matilda Glover Koontz Jackson, first aspirations of pioneering could easily have ended somewhere along the…
March is Women’s History Month, and it seemed fitting to me that a homesteading woman should be celebrated. The woman I chose was arguably at…
If you have a television, you’ve probably seen the PBS series, Simple Living, or at least heard of it. If you’re a fan of the…
It was tough to be Black in the U.S. in the era of “reconstruction” which some people frankly think of as a continuation—for African Americans—of…
“The days of wilderness adventure are not past! The pioneer spirit is not dead!” These stirring words were written by one of America’s best-known homestead…
It’s a story with a simple, but remarkable, beginning. In 1910 a Black American entrepreneur joined forces with a legendary spokesman for Black innovation to…
"I believe the Great Creator has put oil and ores on this earth to give us a breathing spell. As we exhaust them, we must…
In the space of a few short months, two momentous and highly positive events occurred in America, even as the Civil War was at its…
Oscar Micheaux walked the walk, talked the talk, wrote the book, and made the movie; he was perhaps more than anyone, deserving of the title: The…
History’s ironies never cease to amaze me. The same day that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, on January 1, 1863, the Homestead Act went…