No. 427
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
June 16, 2019
alias: OLD JACK
BURGLAR
(Thanks to the late University of Illinois history professor Clarence Walworth Alvord for the guest post, which originally appeared in an essay he wrote for the centennial of the Land of Lincoln‘s 1818 statehood. For context to this 1779 execution, the area comprising the future U.S. state of Illinois had been attached by the British […]
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Executed Today - 6/15/2019
Dressing Miss Lizzie, which is a paper doll book featuring Lizzie’s garments described in newspapers of 1892 -1893 is now …
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 5/30/2019
This handsome cat displays an expression not uncommon among those who visit this blog for the first time.
Watch out for those haunted elevators!
Watch out for those haunted cars!
Watch out for those Swedish ghost pigs!
The Chevalier and his Clowder.
Why gin explains a lot about the 18th century.
Some bridesmaid superstitions.
The murder of a roadhouse keeper.
The barber and
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Strange Company - 6/14/2019
Jeff and Joe
Soapy Smith buries Joe Simmons
The Illustrated Police News
April 9, 1892
(Click image to enlarge)
oe Simmons
was a tall, slender gambler
known to many as “Gambler Joe” Simmons, a member of the Soap
Gang who managed Soapy Smith's Tivoli Club in Denver, 1890, and Soapy's Orleans
Club in Creede, 1892. According to William Devere’s poem "Two Little Busted Shoes," Simmons
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 3/25/2019
Two children playing near their house in Greenwich, New York, the morning of Saturday, October 20, 1889, found a woman’s hat and jacket lying on a log and reported them to a group of men who were working on a road nearby. Reuben Stewart, Superintendent of Streets who was also President of the Village, thought the circumstances were suspicious and went down to take a look for himself. It was a
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Murder By Gaslight - 6/15/2019
Countless artists have painted the Brooklyn Bridge. But not Edward Hopper. Instead of focusing on the city’s most beloved and beatified bridge, Hopper in 1928 used the nearby but less-loved Manhattan Bridge to depict the isolation and solitude of modern urban life. “In his powerful and evocative painting, Manhattan Bridge Loop, Edward Hopper has frozen […]
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Ephemeral New York - 6/9/2019
[Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica Family […]
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