History on Display: Mill City Museum

My Own True Love and I spent the third day of our time in the Twin Cities at the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, which had been on our “must-visit” list ever since we decided to skip over the Twin Cities as we drove along the Great River Road from Minnesota into Iowa in 2018.[1]…

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Lady Duff Gordon, aka Lucile

I honestly thought I had written my last post on changes in ladies’ lingerie.  Then Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon (1863-1935) floated across my path in one of the romantic and subtly sexy gowns with which she wowed the fashionable world at the turn of the twentieth century. I was already familiar with Lucile’s trademark tea gowns…

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Word with a Past: Muckrakers

While I was writing about Rebecca Harding Davis (1831-1910), I started off thinking of her as a proto-muckraker, working a generation before people like Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946),* Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936), Ida Tarbell (1857-1944) and Ida B. Wells (1862-1931). But the closer I looked, the more I realized that the realism for which she was…

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