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The One Simple Trick Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You to Know
On September 25, 1878 readers of The Times in London could have read a letter written by physician Charles R. Drysdale, proclaiming tobacco use to be “one of the most evident of all the retrograde...
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Writers Have All the Ideas
In May of 1903, a man by the name of William West, recently convicted of some crime or other, arrived at the Federal Correctional Institute in Leavenworth, Kansas for processing. As the records clerk...
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Have it My Way
In 1924, while working at his family’s roadside sandwich stand, The Rite Spot, in Pasadena on a part of the famous Route 66, 16-year-old Lionel Sternberger made history when he placed the first slice...
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Not Quite History Yet
I’ve been at this Thursday blogging thing for more than a decade now, which makes me feel terribly old. I’ve never figured out how to make money off it, though apparently some people do. I probably...
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At Least it Didn’t Take Eighty Years
In 1872, Dr. François Merry Delebost was serving as the chief physician for the Bonne Nouvelle prison in Rouen, France when he had a pretty great idea. Every day about nine hundred prisoners engaged...
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I’m Not Quite Sure How to Say This…
In 1837, chemists and business partners John Wheeley Lea and William Perrins decided to clean out the piles of forgotten treasures and banished mistakes from the basement of their pharmacy in...
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Staring at the Wall
On August 22, 1911, artist Louis Béroud intended to spend his day at the Louvre, working his way through mimicking the paintings in one of its many galleries. He’d chosen Salon Carré, the room in...
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Down the Creek Without a Paddle
It’s been a big couple of weeks in the house of practical history. If you’ve followed this blog for long you’re probably aware that I have two sons. When I started this thing way back once upon a time...
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Gardeners in a Pickle
We’ve reached that part of the summer, when the heat and humidity have soared to almost unbearable levels, bins of school supplies have taken over all of the stores, and it seems like everyone I know...
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A Big, Big Man
If you drive along the western portion of US Rt. 2 into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan you will, as you approach the Village of Vulcan in the Norway Township, come across a big, big, man. This man...
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At Some Point I’ll Be Back to Title This Post
In 1880, led by then University President Charles W. Eliot, Harvard began a program of granting sabbatical to its professors. A concept derived from Old Testament Biblical tradition, this year of rest...
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A Preposition Proposition
There’s a video put out by the folks of Miriam-Webster that has been floating around. It’s worth a little thinking about. It suggests that, despite what your third grade teacher taught you, a...
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We Don’t Need No Hatchetations
On June 7, 1900 the clientele of Dobson’s Saloon in Kiowa, Kansas got something of a shock when a tall, possibly slightly unhinged woman entered the establishment with a hymn on her lips and bricks in...
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The Dark Days Ahead
It’s election season once again here in the United States, with early voting already in full swing, and most people convinced that the nation will fall if their pick for president doesn’t win. I’d say...
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This Post is Fire. No Cap.
Lately I’ve been feeling my age pretty keenly. It’s not that I’m old, but I am solidly middle-aged, not yet quite to the morning/evening pill divider, but well beyond the days of waking up without...
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One Wicked Omission
A few weeks ago in this space, I posted a piece about Taylor Swift and the history of public education in the United States. Except that apparently I didn’t. A few hours after the post went live, I...
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It’s Out There
Lately the hubs and I have been on something of a quest. For the last dozen years or so we’ve lived happily in a rapidly growing suburb of St. Louis. It’s been a great community for us with excellent...
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Just Don’t Tell the Historians
Many things likely happened in the year 1404. Numerous babies took their first breaths and plenty of people surely took their last. Battles were waged and both won and lost. Some powerful people...
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Overcoming the Hangries
It was sometime in about 1840 or so that Duchess of Bedford Anna Maria Russell found herself getting a little hangry. At the time, surging industrialization had begun to transform the daily schedule...
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Could Substitute for Ordinary Food
In 1748 in a stroke of genius, the French Parliament solved an important problem by banning a loathsome and gnarled vegetable that while perhaps suitable for hogs, was known to cause leprosy when...
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