Navigating the Heartache WWI Brings
We don’t call the soft drink Coca-Cola “Coke” for nothing. The original formula contained cocaine, but how much is debatable. The beverage’s syrup was manufactured with an extract of coca leaves – it’s the leaves that contain cocaine – and the caffeine rich kola nut. The beverage was one of several coca drinks on the…
Ah, summer. For many of us, it’s our favorite season, and one that in the dead of winter feels like it will never arrive. But what was summer like in the past? If you could take a time machine and travel back 100 or 115 years, what would you see? Upon arriving in the past,…
Like many holidays, Father’s Day had a humble beginning. It began as a day of remembrance for fathers who had passed away. In 1908, a Methodist congregation in West Virginia held a service to honor the 250 fathers who died in a mining accident. Two years later, the first event to be held on the…
Today, news can be accessed at the touch of a button, and it’s sometimes difficult to imagine an age when the newspaper was king. But that’s exactly how it was in the late 19th century. Several newspaper editions were usually published daily, and most communities, no matter the size, had multiple papers competing against each…
Mother’s Day is a holiday born near the dawn of the 20th century. It was conceived by a woman who, ironically, later degraded the holiday as too commercial and tried to stop it. The holiday was not without precedent. Since antiquity, motherhood has been celebrated in some form. The Ancients celebrated their mother goddesses and…
The architecture most commonly associated with the Victorian age is Gothic Revival. Italianate also was common at the time. Both styles are very distinctive, making it easy to tell the age of a building. Let’s take a look at each: Gothic Revival Gothic Revival gets its name from Gothic architecture popular during the Middle Ages.…
In the early morning of April 18, 1906, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked San Francisco. Within minutes it became one of the most devastating natural disasters of the 20th century, coming just a few years after the Galveston Hurricane. The quake had been preceded for decades by smaller earthquakes, foreshadowing what was to come. At…
In the 19th and parts of the 20th centuries, orphans, abandoned children, runaways and children those whose parents were too poor to take care of them ended up in orphanages. Orphanages were funded by public charities. They provided orphans with a home, education, food and clothing. Many of these institutions, however, were overcrowded and underfunded,…
n my continuing effort to study and immerse myself into the early 20th century, I recently finished reading 1000 Turn-of-the-Century Houses. The book is a collection of floor plans from the late 1890s and early 1900s. The floor plans were all drawn by a St. Louis architect named Herbert Chivers. He compiled them into a…
Three weeks ago, we said to goodbye to Downton Abbey. Now it’s time to say farewell to another PBS historical drama, Mr. Selfridge, which began its final season March 27, 2016. Mr. Selfridge revolves around Selfridge’s department store, its owner Harry Gordon Selfridge, his family and the store’s staff. The story begins in 1908, with…