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While piecing together the background of a museum collection object found in the basement storage of the Presbyterian Historical Society, I found myself growing very familiar with a young woman whose dream in life was to become a missionary. Her name was Annie R. Houston, and she chased her dream—going to school to study medicine, interning for three years post-education, and gaining the trust and encouragement of her family—until she caught it. Grasping her dream tightly, Annie traveled to China in September 1891, where she became the first woman physician sent there by the...

Now available in Pearl are photographs of Barber-Scotia College, a historically Black women’s college in Concord, North Carolina. Spanning 1928 through the 1960s,...