Nineteenth Century America
The Wreck of the Sultana
On April 23, 1865, only a few weeks after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrender his troops to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, the steamship Sultana docked in Vicksburg. The Sultana was a 260-foot-long wooden steamboat—about two-thirds of the length of a football field and half as wide.* Built…
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From the Archives: The Mother Jones Monument
It’s Labor Day here in the United States. One of the things I do to celebrate is to share a post from the past about major players in the early American labor movement. I think it’s important to remember that the labor movement fought hard for many things we shouldn’t take for granted, like a…
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From Portable Pianos to Portable Organs
Earlier this week My Own True Love and I were at an event at an aviation history museum in Poplar Grove, Illinois.* In the course of chatting with the executive director, the GI Steinway (aka the Victory Vertical) came up. The director mentioned that another museum in the community had a portable organ made for…
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