No. 445
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
October 23, 2019
alias: BILLY COLEMAN
BANK SNEAK, BURGLAR
On this date in 1943, French abortionist Désiré Pioge was guillotined in Paris by the family-values Vichy regime. Very much overshadowed by the like fate shared by Marie-Louise Giraud a few weeks before, Pioge doesn’t even boast his own French Wikipedia entry — just a passing mention on Giraud’s. (Many other Giraud posts aver that […]
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Executed Today - 10/22/2019
Lizzie’s Old School Chum, Augusta Poole (Mrs. Cyrus Tripp) Shelley M. Dziedzic, October 2019 (all rights reserved) During the hot …
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 10/19/2019
Via historic-uk.com
It is, of course, common knowledge that
one of the precipitating factors of World War I was the murder of
Franz Ferdinand and his wife. However, it is largely forgotten that
another cold-blooded assassination very nearly sparked an armed
conflict between America and Great Britain.
This week, let us remember the Great
Dead Pig War of 1859.
The main stage for our
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Strange Company - 10/21/2019
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
In October 1893, 64-year-old Patrick Finney of New Bedford, Pennsylvania, was visiting his old friend and drinking buddy James Campbell in Hazelton, Ohio. Campbell had been a saloonkeeper in Pittsburgh before retiring and moving with his wife to Hazelton, a suburb of Youngstown.
As was their custom, Finney and the Campbells were drinking heavily the night of October 9. James Campbell had a
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Murder By Gaslight - 10/19/2019
George Grosz made a name for himself drawing and painting caricatures of life in his native Germany during the postwar Weimar era. But this Expressionist painter who helped lead the Dada movement left Germany in 1932 and relocated to New York City, turning his cynical eye on his adopted home city. “New York Harbor,” from […]
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Ephemeral New York - 10/20/2019
[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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A female thief who carries a baby in her arms and made its flowing skirts a cover for stolen goods; New York City. [more]
