Alice Ball Biography: The 23 Year Old Who Solved Leprosy and Had No Credit. Alice Ball earned the first chemistry master’s degree given to a Black woman or any woman at the University of Hawaii. At 23 she solved a problem that had defeated medicine for centuries. She died at 24 before publishing her findings. … Read more
The Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti Biography: The Woman Who Led 10,000 Into a Palace. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti dropped her English name in Britain as her first act of resistance. She led 10,000 women to a king’s palace, forced a monarch to abdicate, went to London as Nigeria’s only female delegate, met Mao Zedong, was accused of communism, had … Read more
The Nongqawuse Biography: A Girl, a River, a Prophecy. In April 1856, a fifteen-year-old Xhosa orphan went to chase birds from her uncle’s crops and came back with a message from the ancestors. What followed – 400,000 cattle slaughtered, 40,000 people dead, a nation broken – is one of history’s most debated events. Was she … Read more
The Yasuke Biography: The African Man Who Walked Into Japan. In 1579, an African man arrived in Japan with a Jesuit missionary. The crowd was so large to see him in Sakai that buildings were damaged. Oda Nobunaga scrubbed his skin trying to find the paint. Then he gave him a house, a sword, a … Read more
The Lozen Apache Biography – The Woman Who Fought For Forty Years. Lozen was born into a desert war. She rejected marriage at puberty, became an Apache warrior and prophet, crossed the Rio Grande on horseback under fire to lead women and children to safety, fought forty years against two governments, and died of tuberculosis … Read more
The Mary Seacole Biography: The Crying Woman of London Street. Mary Seacole was rejected by the War Office, rejected by the army medical department, rejected by Florence Nightingale’s team. She stood in a London street and cried. Then she funded her own passage to the Crimea, built a hotel two miles from the front line, … Read more
The Hector Pieterson Biography: The Boy Who Spike Black Revolution. Hector Pieterson was not supposed to join the march. He was too young. His sister was seventeen and had ironed her uniform the night before. He tagged along anyway. Sam Nzima took six photographs in the chaos. One of them ended apartheid. The night before … Read more
The Raden Adjeng Kartini Biography: She Wrote Letters That Changed a Country. Kartini was locked in purdah at twelve, became the fourth wife of a man twenty-six years her senior, opened Indonesia’s first school for girls, and died at twenty-five giving birth to her only child. Her letters – written in Dutch from a closed … Read more
The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Biography: The Illegitimate Child Who Wrote the First Feminist Manifesto in the Americas. Born illegitimate in colonial Mexico in 1651, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz knew how to read at three, asked her mother to disguise her as a boy so she could attend university, assembled the … Read more
The Professor Bolanle Awe Biography: The Woman Who Write Nigeria Into History. Bolanle Awe joined the University of Ibadan on October 1, 1960 – the exact day Nigeria became independent. She was the first woman on the history faculty. She spent the next six decades insisting that the women Nigerian history had forgotten were worth … Read more