moritherapy/history

This history of celery!

From the page: "Celery was a luxury item for most of the 19th century, though it became cheaper, and thus more common on dining tables, from about 1885 on. By 1900, celery was more often served on a flat glass tray than in a vase.

Why was celery so expensive? And why did people like it so much? It was expensive for much of the 19th century because it was difficult to grow. Wild celery or smallage, native to Britain, had to cultivated by hand, coddled along really, in order to produce a tender, edible vegetable. Smallage in the wild is bitter and earthy-tasting; the French use it is stews and soups sometimes for a flavoring, but it cannot be eaten out of hand."

Born on January 30, 1844 in Philadelphia, Richard Theodore Greener was raised from the age of ten in Boston. He attended the Broadway Grammar School in Cambridge, Massachusetts until he was fourteen, then dropped out of school to help support his family, working as a porter, clerk and night-watchman in an assortment of jobs. With help from two of his employers, August E. Batchelder and George Herbert Palmer, Greener attended preparatory school at Oberlin College from 1862 to 1864 and Phillips Academy at Andover from 1864 to 1865. Batchelder arranged for Greener's admission to Harvard in 1865 as an experiment in the education of African-Americans. In 1870 Greener graduated from Harvard with honors, the first African-American to do so.

Glasgow photographer Thomas Annan's book "The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow". Created between 1868 and 1871 as part of a commission from the City of Glasgow Improvements Trust, this collection of images of the working class areas of old Glasgow helped document the impoverished living conditions of the working class at the time.

A great article about three visits to Auschwitz, each one of them different and bringing deeper understanding.

Mary Anne Shadd, woman publisher in the 1850s. And black. From the page: "During the 1850s, Mary was one of the most outspoken anti-slavery activist in the region. She felt strongly that "caste" or segregated institutions were inappropriate in a free country and only contributed to racial discrimination. Mary believed that integration was the surest route to "race improvement" of Canadian blacks. To promote these views, Mary helped found the Provincial Freeman, a weekly newspaper for the black community of Upper Canada that began publication in 1853. Although listed on the masthead as "M.A. Shadd, Publishing Agent," in reality Mary was the editor of the paper.

In 1854 Mary decided to correct the "misapprehension" that M.A. Shadd was a man. "It was," she wrote,"a mistake occasioned, no doubt, by the habit we have of using initials. We would simply correct, for the future, our error, by giving here the name in full (Mary A. Shadd) as we do not like the Mr. and Esq., by which we are so often addressed."

This revelation unleashed a wave of "sex discrimination" that threatened to close the Provincial Freeman. Mary urged readers not to abandon their support of the paper simply because "it had editors of the unfortunate sex."

St. Augustine has seen the African American experience from a very unique angle-from the first free black town to the final thrust for the Civil Rights Act. Racial struggles of the past have become dramatic victories of the present. In fact, some eyewitnesses of these events still live in St. Augustine today.

An amusing bit of fashion history from the late 18th century. From the page: "Young men, who were soon given the name Incroyables, because they looked incredible, wore a cartoon version of the English country suit. Skintight pants with extremely short vests, often made of flowered fabric, were topped with a jacket made so long its wide flared tails reached the ankles. The coat sleeves were so long that they hid the hands from sight, and the lapels were so large they often stuck out several inches beyond the wearer. The back of the bulky coat was bunched in folds, and the front was cut to look uneven when the jacket was buttoned. The jacket collar stood up high behind the head in back, and a huge cravat, or neck covering, was wrapped so high around the neck that it covered the chin and mouth. Incroyables cut their hair raggedly, and it hung long and shaggy on the sides of their heads, in a style called "dog's ears." "