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An hour before sunset, after a stormy June day, in the year 1648, a crowd of colonists from the very new town of New Haven stood at the shore to watch a ship sail into harbor.
Edward Penfield’s first poster for Harper’s in 1893 shows a man in a green coat absorbed in reading a magazine while being splashed by raindrops; the display type accompanying the figure is as matter-of-fact as can be: “Harper’s for April.”
The name of L. Frank Baum may not carry instant recognition, but his best-known creations, Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, and the Wizard of Oz, are American cultural icons. Baum created them as characters in his book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, first published in 1900.
In 1871, a fire started in the city of Chicago that burnt its buildings to cinder and ashes. After two days of the fire spreading through four miles of inner city, it naturally put itself out. It was discovered that close to one-third of the city was destroyed. Twenty years later, Chicago would play host to the World's Fair in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus's journey to America.
We Heard The Bells: The Influenza Of 1918 (HHS Documentary - 2015)
1918 Influenza Pandemic Survivor Interview: Mrs. Annie Laurie Williams
In 1918 two events were consuming the attention and resources of the world: World War I and the Flu pandemic. The pandemic received scant attention from popular culture though it affected most aspects of everyday life in the U.S. Public institutions closed, most families lost loved ones to the disease, and the mood was grim.
To trace the roots of the current explosion in chicken keeping, you would probably want to consider the influence of Martha Stewart, who trumpeted the appeal of the blue-green eggs produced by her Araucana chickens.
This current cross-country kindness of states helping one another has a notable antecedent. In 1774, cities and towns from Quebec to the Caribbean came to the aid of their rebellious brethren in Boston. Why was Boston suffering?
Written upon the Hall of Fame plaque of Napoleon “Larry” Lajoie, it reads “the most graceful and efficient second baseman of his era.” According to all accounts of his contemporaries and others who saw him play, Lajoie was graceful both in the field and at the plate.
The career of Jane Addams (1860-1935) was bracketed by the founding of the Chicago social settlement, Hull House, in 1889, and her receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. Her list of accomplishments is daunting.
“Action, action, action is the thing. So long as you keep your hero jumping through fiery hoops on every page you’re all right. There has to be a woman, but not much of one. A good horse is much more important.”
Ronald Reagan praised Bayard Rustin’s “moral courage” after the gay civil rights activist’s death in 1987. An anti-gay praising a gay black rabble-rouser who advised Martin Luther King? The 80s were wild, I know, but this wild?
On the evening of May 10, 1849, the British Shakespearean actor William Charles Macready, playing Macbeth, stepped onto the stage of the palatial Astor Place Opera House in lower Manhattan. Built in 1847, the theater had been named for business mogul John Jacob Astor, the richest man in America.
If the Brooklyn Bridge were nothing more than an engineering marvel, that would have been enough to insure its place in the pantheon of great American civic enterprises.
It was an audacious project from the start. Fourteen years in the building, the Brooklyn Bridge easily catapulted itself into the ranks of the Seven Wonders of the Industrial Age.
Acclaimed novelist, lecturer, humorist, journalist, and travel writer—Mark Twain (1835-1910) received a celebrity’s welcome when he arrived in Vienna in September 1897. Bookstores could not keep up with the demand for English and German editions of his works.
When “Buffalo Bill” Cody died in 1917, more than 18,000 mourners attended his funeral and paid their respects while his body lay out for viewing at the Colorado State House
Monhegan Island is a wild, sometimes harsh place. Native Americans roamed here fishing its waters and exploring its rocky wooded terrain. Pirates landed on its shores, some say leaving buried treasure behind. At various times over the centuries, the French and the English claimed ownership of it.
When NASA's New Horizons probe hurtled past Pluto in 2015, it provided hundreds of new images of the far corners of the solar system. Artists, however, have been creating detailed astronomy images of the night sky for hundreds of years, long before modern technology allowed us to send photographic equipment directly into space.
“In the ability to reach, educate and affect the adult population the library occupies a position of great responsibility and is a great power for national defense.” - Charles B. Alexander, speech to the annual meeting of the American Library Association (ALA), September 1918.
Too often overshadowed by its similarly sea-faring cousin, the Navy, the U.S. Coast Guard has a far longer history, and one that’s just as action-packed. Officially formed on January 28, 1915, the Coast Guard is the bureaucratic child of two groups, the United States Life-Saving Service and the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service.
Braille has fascinated me since I was young. My aunt was a volunteer, transcribing print books into braille. I’d watch her punching holes with small tools. These tools were a ‘scale’ and a ‘stylus’. The scale was a hinged piece of metal about 18” long and 2” wide.
John W. Marshall inadvertently made — and changed — history on January 24, 1848, when the carpenter found bits of gold at entrepreneur John Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. The men tried to keep the find a secret, but it proved impossible.
Imagine it’s 1860. You want to capture the clouds over Yosemite. But you don’t just hold your hand above the sky, squint and take a picture. There are no hand-held cameras, no phones, no cars, no GPS. It’s just you, a stagecoach, a twelve-mule pack train, an assistant, and a ton of photographic equipment (literally).
Whereas the Internet and cable television are the ways most receive their news today, in 1855 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News published its first issue with a run of only 30 copies. It was an inauspicious beginning for what was to become by far the most popular illustrated paper in the United States.
You have probably seen the movie “A League of their Own” starring Madonna and Geena Davis. Women’s baseball teams, belonging to the All-American Girls Baseball League (AAGBL) brought the game back to the field during World War II, when most of the professional ballplayers were overseas.
SALEM — The wooded spot overlooking Walgreens on Boston Street is unremarkable. The rocky ledge of knotted trees is surrounded by houses, and the path to the top is unpaved. But the days of anonymity for the site known as Proctor’s Ledge are over.
The battle of Mill Springs in Kentucky was destined to be a pivotal conflict at the outset of the Civil War. Securing this territory would be a major victory for either side due to its proximity to the Mississippi River as well as its reputation for abundant livestock and wheat production.
VISUAL DAY IN HISTORY
Also known as Custer’s Last Stand, this battle in southeastern Montana represented a defeat for US forces in the Great Sioux War of 1876.
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Jordanian-born busboy, shot the presidential hopeful in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as the senator was celebrating his victory in the California Democratic primary. Kennedy died the next day.
Angela Davis, a Marxist professor at UCLA, was jailed for her alleged involvement in a 1970 conspiracy that resulted in four fatalities in an armed takeover of a California courtroom. She was eventually acquitted and released.
There was no joy in Mudville when mighty Casey struck out, according to “Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888.” Ernest Thayer’s iconic poem made its debut in the San Francisco Examiner, omitting eighteen lines originally suggesting Casey threw the game to benefit an uncle who was betting on the outcome. Though “Casey” is a fictional character, a player named Dan Casey was at the time pitching for the Philadelphia Quakers.
Frances Folsom was 21 when she married the 49-yeqr-old Grover Cleveland, making her the youngest First Lady in US history. Widower Woodrow Wilson would also marry his second wife while in office, but the Cleveland-Folsom ceremony in the East Room was the only presidential knot-tying to take place within the White House itself.
Celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the City of Chicago, this two-year World’s Fair paid tribute to modern innovation, as evidenced by the two Zeppelin-like airships surveying the scene.
The catastrophic flood that destroyed Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1889 soon became a familiar subject for amusement park dioramas. Thousands of curious spectators thronged to this “spectacle” at Coney Island, which opened in 1902 after being moved from the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo.
Memorial Day (also known as Decoration Day) was established in 1868 to honor the fallen soldiers of the Civil War. It was traditionally celebrated on May 30 until 1967, when the observance was moved to the fourth Monday in May.
The 35th US President was born in Brookline, a suburb of Boston.
Abolitionist sentiment was strong in Massachusetts during the Civil War, as depicted in this 1943 mural in Washington’s Recorder of Deeds Building.
Like the Brooklyn Bridge 3,000 miles to the east, the Golden Gate bridge stands as a sublime example of engineering know-how and aspirational thinking.
The first of US President to be impeached, Andrew Johnson remained in office only because the Senate declined to convict him by a vote of 35-19, one ballot shy of the two-thirds majority needed to remove.
Between 1908 and 1927, some 15 million Model T’s rolled off the assembly line, bringing affordable four-wheeled horsepower to the masses. The popular cars continued to be workhorses in Depression-era America.
Bicycling was an immensely popular pastime and spectator sport during the post-Civil War era. Boston’s first race took place in Beacon Park on this date in 1878, the same year Albert Pope started manufacturing them nearby.
Long romanticized by gangster wannabes, Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and her husband Clyde Champion Barrow were two of the most notorious “public enemies” during the Depression years.
More than four years after their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright were granted a U.S. Patent 821,393 for “new and useful improvement in Flying Machines.” A glider, not a motorized aircraft, was depicted in the drawings they submitted with their application.
President Andrew Jackson was nominated for a second term at his party’s first national political convention in Baltimore.
Few things symbolize American grit and know-how more than blue jeans, which started going viral when Levi Strauss added their signature copper rivets to the humble denim garment.
Union armies led by General U S Grant made their first sorties in a pivotal Civil War battle that turned the tide against the Confederacy. A “Surrender Monument” resembling an upended cannon was later erected on the site.
Cecil B DeMille’s “The King of Kings” was the debut attraction at Grauman’s when it opened in 1927.
his Northern Pacific Railway poster from the 1920s portrays an idyllic Mount St Helens. Half a century later, its peak was blown to smithereens in a violent eruption of superheated gas and debris that destroyed everything within a radius of eight miles.
The iconic Churchill Downs horse race inspired collectible cards included in cigarette packs that served as cross-promotions for tobacco, another signature Kentucky product.
By 1920, more Americans were living in cities and towns than in rural areas, but the sport of horseshoe pitching would remain popular for decades longer.
Charles Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic flight in May of 1927 galvanized the nation, and the world of animation was no exception. One of Mickey Mouse’s first screen appearances came in the 1928 silent film “Plane Crazy.”
After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to survey the newly acquired land, which stretched from the Mississippi River westward to the Rocky Mountains.
Neither snow nor rain nor cloud cover… The U.S. Post Office issued 24-cent stamps in anticipation of the first scheduled airmail service between New York City and Washington, DC, with a stop in Philadelphia. Flights began a few days later, with Curtiss JN-4H biplanes.
The remains of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., infant son of the famed aviator, were found alongside a road in New Jersey some two months after he was kidnapped from his home four miles away.
One of the most renowned contributors to the American songbook, Irving Berlin was born in Russia and arrived in Ellis Island when he was five years old. "God Bless America" and' "White Christmas" are considered his masterpieces.
With the driving of a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, the eastern and western segments of the nation’s first Transcontinental Railway were merged, allowing passengers and freight to move from the Atlantic to the Pacific for the first time.
Inspired by Anna Reeves Jarvis, a West Virginia Sunday School teacher, the national commemoration of Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May was formalized by President Wilson.
SYNOPSIS: This essay presents an exploration of the evolution of the concept of nostalgia from its inception in the late 17th century to its modern interpretation in the 21st century. By chronicling the path of nostalgia from chronic ailment to evolutionary benefit, it explores nostalgia and its juxtaposition within American history.