I couldn’t resist this charming poem and accompanying illustrations, apparently given as a contribution to a scrapbook in the early 1860s. (Sadly, I have only this page, not the rest of the scrapbook.) In case you have difficulty reading the poem, here’s a transcription: I’ve been requested in this bookTo write lines old or newBy …
A while back, I posted on the solemn subject of Victorian postmortem photography. Here’s a more lighthearted aspect of nineteenth-century photography: the phenomenon of what collectors have nicknamed the “hidden mother.” Contrary to legend, having a picture taken didn’t mean that the subject had to stand still for minutes at a time, except in the …
“Hidden Mothers”: Hiding in Plain Sight in Victorian Photography Read More »
On April 12, 1832, in New York City, thirty-year-old Robert Dale Owen married nineteen-year-old Mary Jane Robinson. The son of reformer and socialist Robert Owen, Robert Dale Owen shared his father’s views and was a writer and a publisher. He also served in the Indiana legislature and Congress, was the American ambassador to the Kingdom …
WARNING: This post contains photos of dead persons, though none are sensational or gruesome. If you are upset by such things, please skip this post. A few years back, I began collecting nineteenth-century photographs. In doing so, I have acquired a number of postmortem photographs. I find them moving and in many cases quite beautiful. …
One of John Brown’s followers in Kansas was August Bondi (1833-1907), a Viennese Jew whose family had immigrated to the United States in 1848 and settled in St. Louis. Just before his family left Vienna, Bondi participated in the student uprising in that city. In 1855, eager for adventure, Bondi came to the territory of …
On November 28, 1865, Francis Meriam, one of John Brown’s men, died in a New York City boardinghouse at age 28. The grandson of Francis Jackson, a prominent Boston abolitionist, Meriam had been one of those left behind in Maryland on guard duty while John Brown and most of his other men proceeded to Harpers …
On October 13, 1859, 21-year-old Francis J. Meriam left Barnum’s City Hotel in Baltimore to go on a shopping trip. The grandson of Francis Jackson, a prominent Boston abolitionist, Meriam had read of John Brown’s exploits in Kansas and may have even gone out there to join him, although he never caught up with Brown. …
In 1861, the citizens of Mound City, Kansas, had a nuisance on their hands: a saloon that served its customers indiscriminately. According to William Mitchell’s Linn County, Kansas: A History, two inebriated soldiers had frozen to death while trying to make their way back to their posts, and another drunken soldier had shot a nurse, …
A couple of years ago, I acquired these two letters written by John Brown, Jr., to Franklin Sanborn in 1885 and 1895. John, Jr., was the oldest son of the abolitionist John Brown, and Sanborn had been one of the senior Brown’s backers known as “The Secret Committee of Six.” Sanborn later published a biography …
In 1865, a widowed Washington, D.C., boardinghouse keeper named Mary found herself at the center of a conspiracy: to kidnap President Lincoln. When the conspiracy plot turned into an assassination plot, Mary Surratt paid with her life, being hanged on July 7, 1865. Nearly six years earlier, however, another widowed boardinghouse keeper named Mary was …