a little history you didn’t ask for
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When Flour Sacks Became Fashion
During the Great Depression, families learned to make use of nearly everything – and that included the cotton sacks that held flour, sugar, animal feed, and other staples. Women were already re-purposing the sturdy fabric into dresses, shirts, underwear, aprons, quilts, and other household goods. Eventually, manufacturers caught on. Rather than printing their sacks with… Continue reading
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What the Founding Fathers’ Pants Can Tell Us
History is often found in letters, diaries, government records and dusty old documents. And sometimes, apparently, it’s found in pants. While listening to Nathan Philbrick’s Travels with George, I learned a wonderfully unnecessary bit of American history: George Washington had very large thighs. According to Philbrick, Washington spent so much of his life on horseback… Continue reading
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For Five Dollars a Day: The Dogs Used to Hunt Human Beings
Sometimes the smallest pieces of the historical record are the hardest to look at. While listening to the audiobook “The Calamity Club” by Kathryn Stockett, I encountered a reference to dogs used to track enslaved people who attempted to escape. I knew about slave catchers, of course, but had never given much thought to the… Continue reading
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The Day I Accidentally Found Barack Obama in My Family Tree
In genealogy research, you never quite know where a perfectly ordinary internet search is going to take you. I certainly wasn’t looking for Presidents the day I Googled the name of my 6X great grandfather, Samuel Dunham (1742-1824). I was simply doing what genealogists do – looking for anything I could find about another long-dead… Continue reading
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The Pilgrims Weren’t Exactly Great Neighbors
Most of us learned a fairly tidy version of the Mayflower story in school. A ship full of Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic in 1620 in search of religious freedom, landed in a strange new wilderness, struggled through a terrible first winter, and – with the help of the Native people they encountered – managed to… Continue reading
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A Family Obituary, a Famous Inventor, and One Very Unexpected Connection
If you’ve ever wondered how much trouble two parents could cause a genealogist nearly 200 years later, allow me to introduce twin brothers, Leman and Lyman Smith. Same (very common) surname, nearly identical first names living in the same place at the same time. One of the twins, Leman Smith (1806-1888) is my 4X great… Continue reading
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Want to Join the Union Army? Open Wide.
Imagine showing up to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War and being told to open your mouth. The Army wanted to see your teeth. And not just because they were concerned about whether you could chew your dinner. Civil War soldiers carried ammunition in paper cartridges. To load a rifle-musket, a soldier… Continue reading
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Varina Davis, Mary Bowser, and a Very Revealing Letter: Life Thoughts After the Civil War
A few years ago I came across the story of Mary Bowser, a formerly enslaved woman who became a Union spy in Richmond during the Civil War. Bowser reportedly worked inside the Confederate White House, where Jefferson Davis lived with his wife, Varina, and passed information she gathered there to the Union. Naturally, that sent… Continue reading
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The Crowd at John Brown’s Hanging
John Brown remains one of the most complicated figures in American history. A fierce abolitionist who came to believe slavery would never be destroyed peacefully, Brown was willing to use violence against those who defended it. In 1856, during the bloody conflict over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state,… Continue reading
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Before Wendy’s, There Was A Bucket of Chicken
Some of the most interesting history is hiding in the most ordinary places – including the food we eat every day. While watching the History Channel’s The Food That Built America, I learned a fascinating little piece of fast-food history involving Dave Thomas, Colonel Sanders, a bucket of chicken and eventually, a Frosty. Dave Thomas,… Continue reading
