Speech:

Graduating Address of Yan Phou Lee at Yale College: The Other Side of The Chinese Question

Speaker:

Yan Phou Lee

1700 - 1899 / Race Equity and Social Justice
Chinese immigration to the United States was a topic of national discussion during the late 1800s. Specifically, the Restriction Period (1882-1888) and Exclusion Period (1888-1943) were years defined by debates over laws that limited the number of Chinese immigrants allowed to enter the United States. During these periods, Chinese immigrants were targets of xenophobia and…  Read more.
Speech:

Speech to Judiciary Committee re: The Rights of Women

Speaker:

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

1700 - 1899 / Gender Equity and Race Equity
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born a free African American on October 9th, 1823 in Wilmington, Delaware. At the age of ten, her family moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania so Shadd Cary and her siblings could receive an education, a right denied to them in Delaware on account of their race. Throughout her childhood, Shadd Cary’s…  Read more.
Speech:

Address to the British Ambassador

Speaker:

William Gottlieb Schauffler

1700 - 1899 / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
Like many Protestant missionaries, William Gottlieb Schauffler sought to spread the Christian faith in lands controlled by the Ottoman Empire. He like many others were sent by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Although most American missionaries went to other parts of Asia, U.S. Protestants established permanent stations in the Levant (1823),…  Read more.
Speech:

The Southern Exodus

Speaker:

Frederick Douglass

1700 - 1899 / Race Equity and Social Justice
Even before Reconstruction ended, many formerly enslaved people came to a discouraging realization. They faced the dim reality that the promises of emancipation, the impeachment of a southern president, and the passage of the Civil War amendments would not produce the kind of change they envisioned. The Compromise of 1877 instead sealed a different fate.…  Read more.
Simon Pokagon
Speech:

The Red Man’s Greeting

Speaker:

Simon Pokagon

1700 - 1899 / American Indian Justice
Simon Pokagon was born in 1830 at the height of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. He also lived through the General Allotment Era (1890s-1910s), when settler-colonizers continued to reduce the land of already diminished American Indian reservations.  Read more.
Belva Lockwood
Speech:

Speech Before the Southern Exposition of Louisville

Speaker:

Belva A. Lockwood

1700 - 1899 / Gender Equity
Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood laid the groundwork for women’s future successes in law and politics. She was the first woman attorney permitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court and one of the first women to run for president of the United States. Her tireless work on behalf of women attorneys, women's suffrage, labor,…  Read more.