Revival History

June 1931. York County, South Carolina. The peach market collapsed with everything else. The Gillespie family owned 25 acres free and clear. Father Robert Gillespie, 55, mother Lula, 52, and twelve kids. The bank held no note but the canner held the contract. June 5 the canner sent a letter. Price was now 40 cents a bushel, down from $1.10. It cost 60 cents to pick it. The canner said leave it or pick it and lose money. The spray bill was due. The fertilizer bill was due. The taxes were due. Robert took the eight oldest kids, 21 down to 12, and went to the orchard. He said they would pick anyway. They had nothing else. Lula took the four youngest, 10 down to 4, and went to the road with a table. She put up a sign. Peaches 5 cents a dozen. They sold to cars from 6 AM to 8 PM. The 4-year-old counted dozens. The 10-year-old made change. They sold 900 dozen in three days. $45. The boys picked 300 bushels. They let 700 rot. They paid the taxes. They paid the spray. They did not pay the fert...

On Christmas Eve 1971, 17‑year‑old Juliane Koepcke boarded LANSA Flight 508 with her mother , flying from Lima toward Pucallpa to reunite with her father at their Amazon research station. The airline already had a notorious safety record, and her father had warned them not to fly with it. But it was the only flight available after Juliane insisted on staying in Lima long enough to attend her high‑school graduation the day before.  About 40 minutes after takeoff, the aircraft entered a violent thunderstorm. Lightning struck the right wing, igniting a fire and causing the plane to break apart mid‑air. Juliane, still strapped to her row of seats, was suddenly falling nearly 10,000 feet toward the Peruvian Amazon canopy. Astonishingly, she survived the fall. The dense layers of rainforest trees likely slowed her descent, and the row of seats may have helped distribute the impact. When she regained consciousness, likely many hours later, she was alone, injured, and surrounded by wreckag...

150 years ago, on this day, the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho Warriors defeated General George Armstrong Custer along with the U.S. 7th Calvary, June 25, 1876 at the Battle of Greasy Grass/Big Horn, in Montana. After General Custer found gold in the Black Hills, SD, which belonged to the Lakota Nation, Custer tried to lead the 7th Calvary to force our ancestors out of the Black Hills and onto reservations and overtake the Paha Sapa (Black Hills).   Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Inkpa Duta and our Oceti Sakowin warriors with Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho Warriors joined in to defeat General Custer and the 7th Calvary at the Battle of Greasy Grass/Little Big Horn, saving the lives of many women, elders and children…Wopida to our ancestors for protecting the people!

Most people noticed his condition first. If you know you have never fall in love in your life please do yourself a favor by not reading a because it will definitely break your heart . She noticed his heart. For much of his life, Joseph Williams lived in a world where strangers often saw his appearance before they saw him. Born with a rare medical condition, Joseph faced challenges from an early age. There were curious stares. Awkward questions. Moments of judgment from people who knew nothing about him except what they saw on the outside. For many, those experiences would have been enough to break their spirit. But Joseph chose a different path. Friends and family remember him for qualities that had nothing to do with his condition. His kindness. His sense of humor. His determination. His ability to make people smile. And his refusal to let life's challenges define who he was. Despite the obstacles he faced, Joseph continued moving forward with quiet strength and optimism. Then he ...

There is a detail about Frederick Douglass's escape from slavery that tends to get lost in the telling. He did not escape alone. Before Douglass boarded that train north in 1838, before he became the most celebrated abolitionist speaker in America, before the autobiographies and the speeches and the audiences that hung on every word — there was a young woman in Baltimore who made all of it possible. Her name was Anna Murray. She had been born free in Denton, Maryland in 1813 — the first of her parents' children to enter the world without chains, just a month after her mother and father had been manumitted. Freedom was the first thing she ever owned. She understood, with the particular clarity of someone who had watched her older siblings born into bondage, exactly what it was worth. By seventeen, Anna had moved to Baltimore and established herself as a laundress and housekeeper, earning a real income in one of the country's most complex cities — a place where tens of thousa...

She personally sat across from the President of the United States and told him exactly what was being done to her people . He made promises. They evaporated. So she did something no Native American woman had ever done before — she wrote it all down and published it. Her name was Sarah Winnemucca. She was born around 1844 near the Humboldt Sink in what is now Nevada, into the Northern Paiute people, the granddaughter of a respected chief. The name her family called her was Thocmentony — "Shell Flower." She grew up in the violent collision of two worlds. As white settlers pushed west across Paiute land, Sarah did something unusual: she learned their language. Several of them, in fact. By adulthood she was fluent in English and Spanish in addition to Paiute and other Native tongues — and that fluency made her one of the most important interpreters in the region. The U.S. Army used her. The Indian agencies used her. She stood in the middle, translating between a government that w...