Portico’s Part in Telling the Story of Emmett Till

The Emmett Till Memory Project teaches new generations about the tragedy that kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement. Preserving its digital assets is vital.
Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Wyoming, 1942

Draft Resistance in Japanese American Internment Camps

Arguing that they had been stripped of their citizenship and rights, hundreds of Nisei risked extending their imprisonment by resisting the draft.
Preah Vihear Temple

A Postcolonial Preah Vihear

The debate over who “owns” Preah Vihear dates to the early twentieth century, when the French government drew the border between Cambodia and Siam (Thailand).
A riveter at work, circa 1940.

Could “Rosie the Riveter” Be Chinese American?

Despite having their citizenship withheld before the war, Chinese American women in the Bay Area made significant contributions to the wartime labor force.
Le Petit Ramoneur (The Little Chimney Sweep) by Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1883

Chimney Sweeps and the Turn Against Child Labor

The slowly expanding protections of “climbing boys” reveal the changing attitudes to child labor in Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
People work to clear the rubble near the village of Nuan Seetaga following the 8.3 magnitude strong earthquake which struck on Tuesday, on October 3, 2009 in Pago Pago, American Samoa

A Village Responds to Disaster

When a tsunami struck American Samoa in 2009, the key to a swift response was Indigenous institutions that drew on local knowledge and community training.
Native American midwives weighing a crying Native Amerian child on a set of scales in the hospital at the Glacier National Park, in northwestern Montana, on the Canada–United States border, circa 1945

Call the Midwives—Assuming Any Are Left

While midwife-attended deliveries are the norm in the United Kingdom, they’re the exception in the United States. Time was, this difference wasn’t so stark.
Slaves waiting for sale, Richmond, VA, 1861

Chains of Credit: The Entrepreneurial Advantage of Slavery

As the financial history of Maryland shows, slavery represented extraordinarily liquid wealth and outsized political power.
Antique wood truncheon club from the 1920s

The Rise of Police Torture in New Orleans

Even as crime rates dropped in the 1930s, the police of New Orleans stepped up their use of torture to obtain confessions from Black Americans accused of crimes.
Wilbert Hunt, 97, the oldest member of the Pueblo of Acoma, casts his ballot at the Acoma Tribal Center in Acoma, New Mexico, 2004

The Fight for Native American Voting Rights

Despite the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, Native American activists have had to repeatedly take their fight for voting rights to Congress.