Navigating the Heartache WWI Brings
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…
Belief in the paranormal is not limited to modern times. It began long ago with our ancestors telling spooky stories for entertainment. The Victorians, especially, were practically obsessed with ghosts and things that go bump in the night. Spiritualism – the belief that the dead can interact with the living through a medium – was…
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,…
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…
Joseph Merrick, sometimes called John Merrick, is the best known Victorian freak show act. He is best known as the Elephant Man. Merrick was born in 1862 in Leicester, England. He was like any other child for the first few years of his life, then he began to develop gray, fleshy and boney tumors on…
Freak Show. Today the mere mention of the words makes us cringe. To the Victorians, however, a freak show was a great way to seek entertainment for an afternoon. Freak shows featured individuals who were considered abnormal in the eyes of polite society and included little people, the obese, people suffering from gigantism, the deformed,…
Today, we live in a society where schools are cutting arts and music education programs. A century ago, however, music education was considered important, and every family that could afford a piano owned one. Some homes even had dedicated music rooms. Before the advent of radio and television, playing music and singing was one way…
Spending time swimming is something most of us expect to do when we go on vacation. Many wealthy and upper-middle-class households even have pools that can be used on a daily basis. That wasn’t the case 100 years ago. People could only swim at public pools and in natural bodies of water. Victorian Swimming Lessons…