Samuel Hynes described the Edwardian era as a “leisurely time when women wore picture hats and did not vote, when the rich were not ashamed to live conspicuously, and the sun really never set on the British flag” – but aside from the fashionable cliques of the upper class, nothing could be further from the …
1903 is a marquee year for aviation, mainly because “first flight” sounds much snappier than “first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft” – and balloon pioneers are too far back in history to fit in with the age of innovation. All the same, the Wright brothers retain their fascination, their first flight at …
A book in which Bertrand Russell proved, for the first time, that 1 + 1 = 2. …and he’ll still be going, and still be relevant (in quite a different way) in the 60s. Usual high standard for this episode of the BBC’s In Our Time podcast, in which a group of historians discuss his …
Bertrand Russell – The Principles of Mathematics Read More »
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. …
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 …
Theodore Roosevelt towers over the Progressive Era like nobody else – he rose to fame at its inception, became president at its height and died as it was spluttering out. Viewed from the 21st century he seems like a mass of contradictions – a strongman intellectual, a populist warmonger who won the Nobel Peace Prize. …
President William McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz on September 6th, 1901, during a visit to the Pan-American Exposition at the Temple of Music in Buffalo, New York. He died eight days later of gangrene caused by the gunshot wounds. He was the third American president to have been assassinated in forty years – …
The Edwardian Era is a short one – a decade at its basic understanding, 14 years in its extended version – but it’s nevertheless an age that lives on in the memories more than any royalty-based-group-of-years since. Usually it’s referred to as a pleasant break between the stern seriousness of the Victorians and the horrors …
Trawling through the years there’s always a lot of talk of the ending of one era and the beginning of another. Much of it is the sort of bluster engaged in to promote an area of study. In 1901 with the start of the 20th century, the death of Victoria (and later McKinley) and the …
