Have a drink with: Agnes Rogers The future is female. Ask her about: Equality, dignity, good manners, mild snark. The other day I was reading a lifestyle blog talking about the challenge of living a halfway sane female existence in the face of social pressures that demand women be simultaneously effortless, clean, intelligent, ambitious, authentic, confident and…
Skip drinks because it’s: The Speed Limit You there, do you know how fast you were going? Ask it about: Can it drive 55? Most of us like to think that history is a parade of accomplishments, but when you get down to it somebody has to invent the everyday stuff, too – and as…
Have a drink with: Spike Jones The best offense is a good fart joke. Ask him about: firearms as percussion instruments In 1942, New York radio DJ Martin Block sold war bonds on air – to an audience that was under wartime food and gasoline rationing – on the promise that he’d give a free…
Have a drink with: The American Voter On Tuesdays we wear white. Ask her about: Her “citizen’s right, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens.”* In case you need some historical comfort for your Election Day habits: Compulsively clicking “refresh” on FiveThirtyEight? We get it. P.T. Barnum got it, too, which is why he…
Have a drink with: Halloween hooligans Trick or treat, smell my feet… Ask them about: Mayhem, outhouses, peanut scramble. It was 1933, and Charles J. Dalthorp had had it. Writing in the Journal of Education in 1937, the superintendent of schools in Aberdeen, South Dakota, bemoaned the Halloween holiday and its attendant juvenile warfare. Describing…
Have a drink with: Your Friendly Postwar Congressional Republicans Reducing sauces AND the national debt… Ask them about: Recipes for your Labor Day cookout In 1962, then-Congressman Gerald Ford lent his name to The Republican Congressional Cook Book, a collection of recipes and peppy political axe-grinding given to constituents. “It is our hope that as…
Have a drink with: William Randolph Hearst “…an especially dangerous specimen of the class.” Ask him: How’d you like Citizen Kane? Kentucky’s William Goebel, who has the unfortunate distinction of being America’s only governor to be assassinated in office, was shot by an unknown gunman in January 1900 during the recount of his own contested…
Have a drink with: Abercrombie and Fitch Do’s: Rifles, tweeds, pickaxes. Don’ts: flip-flops. Ask them about: How to build a fish pond on a Manhattan rooftop The words “Abercrombie & Fitch” might suggest any number of things to you: overpriced t-shirts for cool kids, shady employment practices, shirtless models, or maybe the soothing feeling of being locked inside…
Have a drink with: Ian Fleming Shaken, not stirred. Ask him: hey, can we bring drinks into the library? In 1963 a major exhibition of rare books and printed treasures called Printing and the Mind of Man went up at the Eleventh International Printing Machinery and Allied Trades Exhibition (IPEX) in London, displaying some four hundred…
Have a drink with: The Thanksgiving Turkey Our dinner, who art in oven… Ask it about: Patriotism, Christology, stuffing. On October 28, 1909, the Boston-based Journal of Education – the nation’s oldest continuously published educational journal – prepared its readers for Thanksgiving by printing a suggested script for a holiday-themed school play. This seems harmless…
