"The Witches' Cove," Follower of Jan MandijnThis week's Link Dump is here!Party time at Strange Company HQ!Who the hell was Edward II's very secret lover?What the hell are the Skara Brae artifacts?The "Worst Woman on Earth."Marguerite of France, twice a queen.Hundreds of people die defending the Ark of the Covenant. In 2121.A brief history of the British Women's Police Service.Government mind
Soapy Smith - "street fakir"The Daily NuggetJanuary 28, 1882Tombstone, Arizona
STREET FAKIR WAS WORKING THE 'SOAP RACKET'"
It's been a number of years that we've known that Soapy Smith went to Tombstone, Arizona. I knew that he operated swindles there, likely the prize package soap sell racket, but never had any solid provenance, until now. Good friend, author, and Tombstone historian,
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately engaged as a carrier of wine, because he and his brother, with the help of […]
In 1894, Lizzie Halliday was sentenced to death for
murdering her husband and two others and. A state commission judged her insane
and commuted her sentence to life in an asylum. Though she exhibited all
the signs of a woman who was violently insane, many believed that Lizzie was
merely a gifted actress.
At Mattawan State Asylum, she killed her favorite nurse with
a pair of scissors. No one
After John Sloan and his wife left Philadelphia and relocated to New York City in 1904, the couple lived first in Chelsea and then in various places in Greenwich Village, where Sloan also took a studio at Sixth Avenue and Cornelia Street to create art that found “beauty in commonplace things and people,” as he […]
[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 […]
In August 1842, a sensational new curiosity called the Feejee Mermaid was exhibited at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City. Though it was advertised throughout the country with pictures of traditional, topless female mermaids, the real Feejee Mermaid looked more like an
unnatural amalgam of dissimilar species. Which, in fact, it was. Instead of seeing an alluring full-sized mermaid of legend, visitors to the museum found a small, taxidermically preserved specimen with the withered head and abdomen of a monkey grafted onto the tail of a fish. It was described by one critic as the “incarnation of ugliness.”
The Feejee Mermaid was not new when Barnum introduced it. The mermaid had been on display for months in a museum in Boston and had been exhibited twenty years earlier in London. It took the showmanship and promotional skill of P. T. Barnum to make the Feejee mermaid a star. In addition to the misleading advertisements, Barnum created the story of Dr. J. Griffin, an English naturalist who captured the mermaid near the island of Feejee.
Not everyone believed in the mermaid’s authenticity. The Feejee Mermaid had as many skeptics as it had avid believers and heated debates went on wherever it as exhibited. P. T. Barnum did not care whether people believed in the mermaid or not, as long as they came to see it. As he (allegedly) said, “The bigger the humbug, the better people will like it.”
Sources:
Barnum, P. T. Struggles and triumphs, or Forty years' recollections of P.T. Barnum written by himself. Author's ed. Buffalo, N.Y.: Warren, Johnson, 1873.
Boese, Alex. The museum of hoaxes: a collection of pranks, stunts, deceptions, and other wonderful stories contrived for the public from the Middle Ages to the new millennium. New York, NY: Dutton, 2002.
"We follow vice and folly where a police officer dare not show his head, as the small, but intrepid weasel pursues vermin in paths which the licensed cat or dog cannot enter."
The Sunday Flash 1841