The Exposition Flyer

I’ve been spending a lot of time in 1893 lately, and have come to the conclusion that all historical roads of the time led to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The exposition is hard to avoid if you’re a history nerd living in Chicago for more than a year or two, so I feel…

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From the Archives: Running on Railroad Time

In case you haven’t heard, I am still deep in book mode.  May 1 approaches, and I am doing the revision hokey-pokey.  (Put the right words in, take the wrong words out, but the right words, and you shake it all about.)  While I turn myself around, here is a post for your amusement that…

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Running on Railroad Time

I was recently reading an excellent new book on the Battle of Waterloo* in which the author made an off-hand comment about the difficulty of synchronizing accounts even when sources give exact times for events because there was no standardized time. Until the rise of the railroads in the mid-nineteenth century, time was essentially local.…

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