Public humanities/Featured
Sunday's featured articles[edit | edit source]
Different articles are featured here each day of the week. Visit again tomorrow to discover new public humanities resources.
Learn more about the Florida citrus industry worker Horace Thompson at Federal Writers' Project - Life Histories
"Uncle" Henry Rayamore
“Uncle” Henry Rayamore was an African-American sharecropper during the Reconstruction Era turned fortune-teller right before the the Great Depression in Alabama. He fathered two daughters and left a legacy of entrepreneurship. Most of what one can know about Rayamore comes from an interview he did for the Federal Writer’s Project. Due to the limited information regarding “Uncle” Henry Rayamore, most of his personal information such as his early life and the details regarding his family and death are either un-verified or non-existent.
Learn more about "Uncle" Henry Rayamore at Federal Writers' Project - Life Histories
Charles Riborg Mann
In 1914, he became involved in the Joint Committee on Engineering Education of National Engineering Societies and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in New York City collecting information about the engineering and physics education throughout the country. In 1918, he was appointed a civilian advisor to the Committee on Education and Special Training in the United States' War Department. There, Mann was involved in creating the Student's Army Training Corps. He corresponded with government representatives from the War Department and with university administrators around the country. The committee’s work contributed to the development of relations between the U.S. military and the country’s university systems. Mann sent many reports and telegrams detailing his opinions and actions on the topic of training students for the military while allowing them to continue to attend college.
Learn more about Charles Riborg Mann at World War I -- Life Histories
Sally Thomas
Sally Thomas was born into slavery in 1787 on a tobacco plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia, near Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello. Her life represents the experience of an illiterate black female entrepreneur, of whom there were thousands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most of these women were seamstresses and laundresses. Records of the lives of these women, many of whom were poor and illiterate, are very limited. As such, that fact that historians have ferreted out Thomas’ story from extant records is unusual. Thomas became “quasi-free,” a term used to describe an enslaved person whose master allowed them to live as a free person, even though a formal deed of emancipation from the state had not been obtained.
Learn more about Sally Thomas at The Crafting Freedom Project