Navigating the Heartache WWI Brings
Molasses. Chances are it’s something you don’t have in your pantry, but 100 years ago it was a household staple. Molasses is processed from sugar cane and is used as a sweetener; it is a dark brown, barely viscous liquid. One January day, molasses also became synonymous with death. An industrial accident in Boston, known…
The silence of a small New England town was shattered on the afternoon of August 4, 1892. Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, were brutally murdered with an ax. No one heard anything while the crime was being committed, but the media sensation it caused was heard across the country. Maid Bridget Sullivan was…
In a roundabout way, it is Edwin Hubble we have to thank for the Star Wars franchise. Without his work, we would not have the concept of a galaxy far, far away. If you were alive before the 1920s, when you gazed into the night sky, you believed everything in the heavens was a member…
Her name is lost in history to all but the most ardent baseball fans. Mary Elizabeth “Lizzy” Murphy, the Queen of Baseball, was the first woman to play for a major league baseball team. Born in 1894 in Rhode Island, Murphy had sports in her blood. Her father was a semi-professional baseball player. As a…
Corruption always has been a part of American politics. No one exemplifies this more than William “Boss” Tweed. Tweed was active in New York City politics in the mid-19th century. He was portrayed by Jim Broadbent in the 2002 film The Gangs of New York, and is best known for his role as head of…
What would you purchase if you had more money than you knew what do with? A private island? A fleet of personal jets? A sports team? Gilded Age industrialist Andrew Carnegie purchased a dinosaur skeleton. Carnegie became interested in dinosaurs in 1898 after reading an article in the New York Journal that detailed the discovery…
Visitors to zoos today see animals housed in large enclosures where the creatures have room to play, exercise and interact with their own kind. This wasn’t always the case. More than a century ago, animals were kept behind bars in small cages. Sometimes the situation was even worse, as with Gunda the elephant, an inmate…
Can something be simultaneously genius and vilely racist? This is the question posed by D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Silent film star Mary Pickford called it the first movie that made people take the motion picture industry seriously. The film debuted in a politically charged atmosphere, full of anti-immigrant bias, racial tensions,…
In World War II, a group of Navajo enlisted in the Marines with the sole purpose of developing unique communication codes. These Marines came to be known as the “code talkers,” soldiers who developed signals and messages based on native languages that when translated into English spelled out specific messages. The Navajo became famous for…
President Woodrow Wilson struggled to maintain United States neutrality when war broke out in 1914. Strong social and political forces lobbied specific arguments supporting intervention or isolation. With the declaration of war in April 1917, Wilson understood that in order to maintain public support for the war, the U.S. government needed to create an agency…