On this day in 1963, more than 250,000 protesters gathered in Washington, DC, for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At that time, it was the largest demonstration for human rights in United States history. The event has origins in the March on Washington Movement (MOWM), which was led by civil rights activist More
Today is Women’s Equality Day, which commemorates the certification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution on August 26, 1920, in which citizens could no longer be denied the right to vote by any state on account of their sex. The fight for the vote was a complex movement marked by cooperative action and More
On this day in 1920, author Ray Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago. While Bradbury’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1934, his childhood in Illinois profoundly shaped his career. The idyllic setting of Waukegan would later resurface in some of his most famous works—as Green Town in Dandelion Wine More
Today is World Photography Day, which celebrates the art, craft, science, and history of photography. The Chicago History Museum’s Research Center is home to more than 6.5 million images, making it the single largest source of pictorial information for the Chicago metropolitan area from the early nineteenth century to the present. Notable photographers whose works are More
After three years, eight months, and seven days of US participation in World War II, fighting unofficially ceased on this day in 1945. Imperial Japan accepted the terms of the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender (the Potsdam Declaration) after the US detonated atomic bombs in Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. More