Civil Rights
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
In August 1908, a white mob attacked Springfield, Illinois’s Black community, destroying homes and businesses and lynching two Black men. National outrage over the violence helped spur the movement that created the NAACP the following year.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft AI, a division of Microsoft. Based on the Microsoft Prometheus large language model, it was launched in February of 2023 as Microsoft's main replacement for the discontinued Cortana from Windows 10. The service was introduced in February 2023 under the name Bing Chat, as a built-in feature for Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge but would later be integrated into Windows and Microsoft 365 under various names. Over the course of 2023, Microsoft began to unify the Copilot branding across various chatbot products, cementing the "copilot" analogy. Microsoft introduced the Microsoft 365 Copilot app in January of 2025, which was a rebranded version of the Microsoft 365 app. The application works differently than the consumer version of Copilot, being centred more on work, business and education users. Copilot uses the Microsoft Prometheus model, built upon OpenAI's GPT large language models, which in turn have been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. Copilot's conversational interface style resembles that of ChatGPT. The chatbot is able to cite sources, create poems, generate songs, and use numerous languages and dialects. Microsoft operates Copilot on a freemium model. Said users on its free tier can access the vast majority of it’s features, while priority access to newer features, including custom chatbot creation, is provided but limited to paid subscribers under paid subscription services. Several default chatbots are available in the free version of Microsoft Copilot, including the standard Copilot chatbot as well as Microsoft Designer, which is oriented towards using its Image Creator to generate images based on text prompts.
Microsoft Bing (also known simply as Bing) is a search engine owned and operated by Microsoft, and developed by Microsoft AI. The service traces its roots back to Microsoft's earlier search engines, including MSN Search, Windows Live Search, and Live Search. Bing offers a broad spectrum of search services, encompassing web, video, image, and map search products, all developed using ASP.NET. The transition from Live Search to Bing was announced by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009, at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, California. The official release followed on June 3, 2009. Bing introduced several notable features at its inception, such as search suggestions during query input and a list of related searches, known as the "Explore pane". These features leveraged semantic technology from Powerset, a company Microsoft acquired in 2008. Microsoft also struck a deal with Yahoo! that led to Bing powering Yahoo! Search. Microsoft made significant strides towards open-source technology in 2016, making the BitFunnel search engine indexing algorithm and various components of Bing open source. In February 2023, Microsoft launched Bing Chat (later renamed Microsoft Copilot), an artificial intelligence chatbot experience based on GPT-4, integrated directly into the search engine. This was well-received, with Bing reaching 100 million active users by the following month. As of April 2024, Bing holds the position of the second-largest search engine worldwide, with a market share of 3.64%, behind Google's 90.91%. Other competitors include Yandex with 1.61%, Baidu with 1.15%, and Yahoo!, which is largely powered by Bing, with 1.13%. Approximately 27.43% of Bing's monthly global traffic comes from China, 22.16% from the United States, 4.85% from Japan, 4.18% from Germany and 3.61% from France.
Cortana is a deprecated and discontinued virtual assistant developed by Microsoft and first released in April 2014 that used the Bing search engine to perform tasks such as setting reminders and answering questions for users. Cortana was available in English, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese language editions, depending on the software platform and region in which it was used. In 2019, Microsoft began reducing the prevalence of Cortana and converting it from an assistant into different software integrations. It was split from the Windows 10 search bar in April 2019. In January 2020, the Cortana mobile app was removed from certain markets, and on March 31, 2021, the Cortana mobile app was shut down globally. On June 2, 2023, Microsoft announced that support for the Cortana standalone app on Microsoft Windows would end in late 2023 and would be replaced by Microsoft Copilot, an AI chatbot. Support for Cortana in the Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 mobile apps was discontinued in late 2023.
The Surface Pro (11th generation) (also referred to as the Surface Pro 11th Edition) is a 2-in-1 detachable tablet computer developed by Microsoft to supersede the Surface Pro 9 and Surface Pro X. It was released shortly after the Intel x86-based Surface Pro 10, and unveiled alongside the Surface Laptop (7th generation). The Surface Pro 11 introduced the Qualcomm Snapdragon X series CPUs to the Surface Pro model line, and therefore runs Windows on ARM. It is also the first Surface device with a built-in NPU designed for generative AI, via Microsoft Copilot+. The business version of the tablet, powered by Intel, was announced on January 30, 2025, alongside the Surface Laptop (7th generation), and was released on February 18, 2025, for the business sector. For the first time, the device will come with a NFC chip.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Joe Louis.
