A bit of a grim story today, though it is perhaps illustrative of the golden age of Vaudeville. Just after Christmas 1903, comedian Eddie Foy was starring in a sold-out matinee performance of a musical comedy, “Mr. Bluebeard,” in Chicago’s prestigious Iroquois Theater. 2000 people, mostly children and their mothers, were crowded into the theatre. …
The revolution in sound recording is obviously the main focus of this site – but as far as a standard history of popular culture is concerned, the 1900s are better-remembered for the beginnings of the film industry – not yet started in Hollywood, but already beginning to differentiate this century from the last. Up to …
Orville Wright flies an aircraft with a petrol engine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in the first documented, successful, controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight The first Tour De France is won by Maurice Garin The first Teddy Bear is created, based on this drawing of Theodore Roosevelt sparing the life of a bear cub American socialite …
MP3 direct download | Itunes | Mixcloud | Feedburner (RSS) | MP3 pack “Under it all there’s a sort of strong, dark pulsing, the dimly recorded echo of the thundering rhythm: trombones, sousaphones (named after your man, of course), drums. The dynamics build to a controlled climax, the sound getting heavier and heavier as …
StanisÅ‚aw WyspiaÅ„ski — Self-portrait Gwen John — Self-Portrait Thomas Eakins — Self-portrait Pablo Picasso — Femme aux Bras Croisés John Singer Sargent – William M. Chase, N. A. John William Waterhouse – The Crystal Ball Abanindranath Tagore – The Passing of Shah Jahan William Orpen — The Chess Players Walter Osborne — Tea in the …
Or alternatively, Le Voyage dans la Lune and some other short films from 1902. The first film in our selection is a true leap forward for humanity, probably the first film that really stands up 116 years later, both as a very watchable story and as a work of art. If you’ve never watched it …
A staple of weird history sites, the Poison Squad were a self-selected group of healthy young men who willingly ingested food laced with untested food additives including formaldehyde and Borax. From their brave efforts come the foundations of the US FDA. Stuff You Missed In History Class have an episode about them, usual provisos about …
Everyone knows that the calendar we use makes very little logical sense, but once such a fundamental standard it set, would anyone ever go to the trouble of trying to change it? Well, it turns out that the answer is yes – Moses B. Cotsworth did, and he got surprisingly far too, until the more …
Here’s one of those stories you might reasonably consider to be an old shaggy dog tale, but which turns out to be the work of a single author, adapted ad infinitum since its publication in 1902. It has a novel concept, and a nice subtle extra twist, but having read a lot of Poe and …
116 years before the combination of uncanny valley CGI and the voice of James Corden, a minor Childrens’ publisher put out a small run of picture books about a naughty rabbit. This book immediately lifted its 32-year-old author out of obscurity and went on to be one of the best-sellers of all time. Before I …
