Blogs

The John Coffee Hays Collection at UT Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History contains a printed oral history by early Texas historian Andrew Jackson Sowell. The oral histories recount the involvement of settler Thomas Galbreath in three frontier skirmishes between the Texas Rangers and Comanche warriors during the 1840s. Sowell’s article serves as an example of the way Texas’s early events were passed orally by participants and thus became part of the inexact and possibly fictional landsca...

The Sadie Hawkins dance is a familiar tradition to most Americans, best known for the custom of girls asking boys to the dance instead of the other way around. In a world where women run businesses, lead governments, and head nearly half of U.S. households, setting aside one special night for girls to take the lead can feel unnecessary and outdated. Still, the story behind Sadie Hawkins herself offers a fascinating window into Depression-era America and the surprising ways popular culture can sh...

Destitute and convinced she was dying, Calamity Jane boarded a train in Billings, Montana, without a ticket. When she was about to be kicked off in Sheridan, Wyoming, sympathetic fans paid her way so she could get home to Deadwood. Dick Nelson was a railroad man who knew many of the characters who made the Wild West famous. He had arrived in Northern Wyoming in 1888 and became a freight brakeman with his headquarters in Sheridan. As a representative of the railroads, Nelson was assigned to...

Whether relayed by way of a novel, poem, movie, or word of mouth, stories have served as a means of connecting people through shared experiences and emotions since we first learned to communicate with one another. Some of the most famous stories have endured for hundreds or thousands of years. William Shakespeare penned his celebrated plays in the 16th and 17th centuries. Beowulf was written several hundred years before that, while the Iliad and Odyssey epics push back even further into the f...

Whether relayed by way of a novel, poem, movie, or word of mouth, stories have served as a means of connecting people through shared experiences and emotions since we first learned to communicate with one another. Some of the most famous stories have endured for hundreds or thousands of years. William Shakespeare penned his celebrated plays in the 16th and 17th centuries. Beowulf was written several hundred years before that, while the Iliad and Odyssey epics push back even further into the f...

After more than a century of use as a maritime distress signal, “SOS” has become shorthand for just about any emergency. You may have heard that it stands for “save our ship” or “save our souls,” but that’s actually a backronym, or an acronym made up after the fact. The letters in “SOS” didn’t initially stand for anything; they were originally chosen because they form a sequence of Morse code that can be transmitted more quickly than others. Morse code (named for Samuel Morse) is a way of tra...

Lighters were invented before modern matches. Lighters seem, on the surface, to be a little more advanced than your standard pack of matches. But lighters were actually invented before matches as we know them today. Until the early 19th century, “matches” were flammable sticks made to carry fire from one place to another, not make fire on their own. Early self-igniting matches were too dangerous to be practical. The earliest, invented in 1805, involved dipping potassium chlorinate into sulphu...

In 1843, approximately 1,000 people embarked on the arduous journey west across the young United States in the first major wagon train migration on the Oregon Trail. Spanning more than 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri, to the promising lands of the Oregon Territory, the trail served as a lifeline for those seeking new beginnings in the American West. Each day, migrants traveled an average of 15 miles, though on a good day, anywhere from 18 to 20 miles could be covered, most of it on foot....

When young Bobby Dunbar went missing in 1912, the whole country was eager to find him. The four-year-old Louisianan vanished into thin air on August 23, during a trip to Swayze Lake. Lessie and Percy Dunbar searched everywhere, to no avail. Desperate police dissected alligators and threw dynamite into the lake, and then offered a reward of $6,000 (about $160,000 today). All seemed lost until eight months after Bobby’s disappearance, when police arrested a man named William Cantwell Walters...

In 1950, the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar was more than 13 times greater than it is today, meaning your money went much further, at least when it came to certain expenses. For instance, the average cost of a brand-new Chevrolet sedan was just $1,450 that year, the equivalent of around $19,416 today when adjusted for inflation. The median price for a single-family home, meanwhile, was only $7,354, or around $98,474 in today’s money. (If only!) That said, salaries were lower in the mid-2...

Back in 1919, British airline Handley Page Transport made aviation and gastronomical history by serving the first in-flight meal. It wasn’t at all fancy — just a cold sandwich and fruit handed out by “cabin boys” on a flight from London to Paris. Over the next 100 years, however, aircraft meals underwent a variety of changes; in the years after World War II, multicourse suppers were served with tablecloths and real cutlery, a stark departure from today’s precooked and reheated trays or tiny bags...

In March 1843, John Quincy Adams did something historic: had his picture taken. He did so at artist Philip Haas’ studio in Washington, D.C., sitting for a portrait captured via daguerreotype, the first successful photography format. Adams’ single term as president had ended in 1829, and at the time he was photographed, he was representing Massachusetts in the House of Representatives. Kim Sajet, director of the National Portrait Gallery, said upon acquiring the daguerreotype that Adams's having ...

Patrick Henry wrote the following five resolutions against the Stamp Act and introduced them to the House of Burgesses on May 29, 1765. The House passed them after a heated debate, but rescinded the fifth resolution the following day. This iteration of the Virginia Stamp Act comes from a handwritten document that was found inside a small envelope that Henry included with his testament. Author: Patrick Henry Resolved, That the first Adventurers and Settlers of this his Majesties Colony and ...

The doctors' riot was an incident that occurred in April 1788 in New York City, where the illegal procurement of corpses from the graves of the recently deceased caused a mass expression of discontent from poorer New Yorkers that was directed primarily at physicians and medical students. Background By the end of the American Revolution, roughly one-fifth of New York City's population was black, most of whom were slaves. Their low social standing allowed slaves' bodies to be buried only out...

The number 13 has long been considered unlucky in many Western cultures. Even today — in a world far less superstitious than it was in the past — a surprising amount of people have a genuine, deep-rooted fear of the number 13, known as triskaidekaphobia. For this reason, many hotels don’t list the presence of a 13th floor (Otis Elevators reports 85% of its elevator panels omit the number), and many airlines skip row 13. And the more specific yet directly connected fear of Friday the 13th, known ...

Patrick Henry introduced a series of resolutions known as the Virginia Stamp Act Resolves, which argued that only the General Assembly had the authority to levy taxes on Virginia colonists. Henry also argued that any attempts by the British government to tax Virginians without their consent were an attack on their rights. Although the resolutions were controversial, most of them were passed by the House of Burgesses and published in newspapers throughout the American Colonies. ...

A new find suggests farmers in the Bible lands built channels for irrigation long before historians thought they did, allowing for cultivated vineyards, olives, wheat, and barley. By using walls to channelize and collect floodwaters, ancient farmers made the most of scant rainfall to grow crops in the desert. These techniques are still used today, like in this field outside the old city of Avdat, Israel. The current thinking is that these desert denizens didn't practice agriculture before ...

After Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency. Lincoln had selected Johnson, a former Democrat from Tennessee, as his vice presidential candidate because Johnson’s presence appeased southern sympathizers who desired a quick peace process. Johnson, however, fought constantly with the Republican majority in Congress. One of their major disagreements was over the federal government’s role in promoting social, political, and economic equality for former slaves and ...

On the 2nd of July 1843 (on Sunday), an alligator appeared in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. The alligator rained down from the sky, according to the Times-Picayune's newspaper clipping in New Orleans. Weather Conditions on That Fateful Day The article speaks about the weather conditions on that day, and it made use of the 1843 charm in doing so. It read that in Charleston, S. C., Sunday week was a day extremely bad for its heats, but during the night a thunderstorm relieved the weathe...