Pulling back the curtain
The Freedmen’s Bureau, founded after the Civil War, was a government agency with the goal of providing goods and services to newly freed African Americans, helping them become self-sufficient following emancipation. An 1867 request to the bureau for food describes a household of five: one 48-year-old, two 80-year-olds, and two 100-year-olds, one of whom was […]