The true pioneering heroes of the Edwardian Era were not The Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. This supposedly tranquil time was in truth the most turbulent age of social activism between the Civil War and the 1960s, and naturally the real drivers of this new “Progressive” age were less likely to be old, …
You may already have heard the inception myth of the teddy bear. Teddy Roosevelt, the definitive POTUS and all round man’s man, out on one of his regular hunting trips, refuses to kill a female bear as it has a young cub. A political cartoonist uses the story to illustrate Roosevelt’s humanity and sense of …
A truism that bears continual restating; the Edwardian / “progressive” era was really, truly racist. Even the most diehard bigots these days would be unlikely to begrudge a black man his boxing career, but it took the best part of a decade of being the best boxer in the world, and two years of stalking …
The third modern olympiad, despite the dropping of such noble sports as kite flying, pigeon racing, cannon shooting and fire fighting, is still talked about as one of the strangest and most misguided sporting events in history. A few reasons: The games was moved from the fairly reasonable location of Chicago to the comparative backwater …
Strychnine, Egg Whites, Brandy and a Human Zoo: The Terrible 1904 Olympics Read More »
This month’s mix features one of the only recordings in existence by a ‘castrato’ – a man who was castrated as a youth in order to maintain his choirboy-like vocal range. Most recordings featured in my mixes have little, if any, information available about them, and few of the artists even have a biography online, …
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 …
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 …
