In a previous issue of American Legacy we published an excerpt from Carolyn Quick Tillery’s cookbook The African-American Heritage Cookbook: Traditional Recipes and Fond Remembrances from Alabama’s Renowned Tuskegee Institute (1996). Tillery’s cookbook was a loving tribute to the foods and people of Tuskegee, Alabama and Tuskegee Institute. In it she mixed biographical sketches, historical photographs, reminiscences, even poetry, with the...

Often when we think of bicycle racing we think of the Tour de France, the multiple stage race held each year with teams of elite riders from around the world making their way on a grueling course through France and surrounding countries, ending with the winner crossing the finish line on the Champs Elysee in Paris. But years before the first ever Tour de France was held in 1903, bicycle racing gripped the American sports fan with a fervor that...

About ten years ago American Legacy featured an artist named Whitfield Lovell in an article titled “Whispers from the Walls.” The Bronx-born Lovell, whose three-dimensional tableaux—life-size charcoal portraits on pine board, punctuated with everyday (and not so everyday) objects found in flea markets and antique malls, tel the life stories of ancestors, family, and once anonymous individuals from the nineteenth and early twentieth...

Since 1988 the National Trust for Historic Preservation has selected eleven historic sites it considers the most endangered in the country. To qualify for this list a site must be threatened by neglect and deterioration and suffer from a lack of maintenance and funding. In 1998 the list included as a group 103 historically black colleges and universities. The oldest extant black college is Lincoln University, founded as Ashmun Institute in 1854....

Photographer Sarah Hoskins’ mission is not so much to preserve history, as to keep people and places from passing into history, without acknowledgement or notice, understanding or regard. This has been her passion since she began 13 years ago to create a visual record of hamlets near Lexington, Kentucky, small villages founded by ex-slaves and populated by their fifth- and sixth-generation descendants. Because these hamlets are largely missing...