With an abundance of navigable rivers in Alabama, steamboat traffic flourished and was the primary form of transportation for goods and people from the state’s founding into the 1880s. Many [more]

Mount Vernon, located in south-central Mobile County, arose near Fort Stoddert, which was constructed by the federal government in 1799 to protect what was then the nation’s southern border. In [more]

Kate Cumming was a Civil War nurse and diarist whose writings are an invaluable source on southern nursing, Confederate hospitals, and women’s experiences in the war. Born in Scotland, Cumming [more]

William Wyatt Bibb was Alabama’s first governor. He entered politics in 1802 at the age of 21, first as a Georgia state legislator, quickly followed by US Congress and then [more]

On July 8, 1860 the last known slave ship, Clotilda, sailed into Mobile Bay with 110 African men, women, and children on board.  Following Emancipation in 1866, many of these [more]

The Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind was founded in 1858 in Talladega by Dr. Joseph Henry Johnson to offer instruction in farming, trades, home economics and humanities.  Throughout [more]

First discovered in Chilton County in the late 1830s, gold, or the promise of it, is credited with the establishment of many communities and gold-mining operations in east-central Alabama in [more]

Touring the United States starting in 1824 to expose a new generation to the “Spirit of 1776,” the Marquis de la Lafayette, former aide to George Washington, arrived in Alabama [more]

The Treaty of Cusseta was an agreement between the U.S. government and the Creek Nation in which the Creeks were forced to exchange their remaining land in Alabama for new [more]

Between 1875 and 1928, the state of Alabama profited from a form of prison labor known as the convict-lease system perpetuating a form of slavery. Under this system, companies paid [more]