The uncompromising abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was long on rhetoric but short of money during most of his life. As a young man, he served seven weeks in a Baltimore …

[jpshare]In the summer of 1865, Mary Ames and Emily Bliss, young women from Springfield, Mass., were trying to teach the alphabet to 80 children of freed slaves on Edisto Island, …

Crystal Eastman wanted to change the world for women and to change the way women lived in the world. For that, she was called “the most dangerous woman in America.” …

Samuel Sewall feared and disliked the Quakers who zealously challenged the Puritan regime in Massachusetts. Sewall, who sat in judgment during the Salem witch trials, had no problem with the …

One day at the Brownington school in Orleans County, Vt., a youngster approached the front of the class to answer an arithmetic question. His classmates, as a joke, pinned a …

If Leonard Hoar hadn’t been so mean he might have realized his dream of turning Harvard into a leading 17th-century research institution with chemical laboratories, a botanical garden, an agricultural-research …