You can make the case that there are only two kinds of picture postcards — advertising cards and everything else. Since the 1893 Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair), picture postcards have served to promote the virtues of the places and things
The funicular (whose origins are obscure) and Elisha Grave Otis’s elevator spelled the end of the need for monumental flights of steps. Before then, steps were built for getting up steep grades. Whether the goal was to arrive at a monument, a
Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born in 1879 into a family that had a substantial Virginia plantation that was lost in the Civil War. Her father, Chiswell Langhorne, a colonel in the Confederate army, was mustered out in 1861 and could not recover
Early in life Charles A. Lindbergh exhibited an interest in mechanical things, particularly automobiles. In 1920, aged 18, he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin as a mechanical engineering student but early in 1922, when the aviation craze caught up with him, he dropped out
The Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, a part of metropolitan Los Angeles, was not the first cemetery in the area. That is probably the City Cemetery, a joint venture of several fraternal organizations including the IOOF (Independent
On March 10, 1864, when President Abraham Lincoln officially named Ulysses S. Grant to take charge of the entire Union Army against the Confederate military of Robert E. Lee, he had hopes that the choice would end the string of ineffective leaders of
Cotton was the most farmed crop in the southern and western parts of America well into the twentieth century. It was labor-intensive, needing large numbers of workers to plant, chop, and harvest. Cotton growing had expanded westward as far as Texas by
The discovery of gold and silver in the American West led to tens of thousands of men arriving to seek their fortunes. Their living conditions were appalling — they camped in tents or worse, dumped their sewage into the same water
You can’t find Hires Root Beer anywhere, anymore, no matter how hard you look. The company that now owns the brand name has effectively retired it to push its A & W brand.
In its time, though, Hires Root Beer
Born from the competition for delivering freight and passengers between the City of Baltimore and points along the Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay (Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Old Port Comfort), the Baltimore Steam Packet Company was created in 1840 from
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