The World League for a Sane Christmas
Indianapolis News, July 18, 1911. Oh, tired Christmas shoppers! Burned out on commercial...
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Author: Stephen J. Taylor
Die Weihnachtseinkäufe
Die Weihnachtszeit ist nahe. Christmas time is near. That’s not an ad from overseas. At...
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Grasshopper Jails & Other “Monkey Business”
If you peek into newspapers from any decade, it doesn’t take long to find some downright...
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Bacteria, Blood & Bad Dreams: The Unsolved Murder of Helen Knabe
How did one of Indiana’s pioneer investigators into STDs and rabies come to a gory end? The...
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The Rise and Fall of the Billy Goat Beer
If you strolled down the streets of Indianapolis in 1900, you would have needed a bale of cotton...
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Keep Your Sauerkraut Away From My Bicycles
In 1896, readers of the Christmas Eve edition of Cycling Life, a trade magazine for...
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Rufus Cantrell, Intruder in the Dust
In 1935, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges weighed in on what mathematicians later called...
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“Escaped Nuns are Myths”: The Roots of a Forgotten Riot
Did you ever hear about the riot sparked by horror tales, a Holiness preacher, and a renegade nun?...
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When the Man Who Inspired Dracula Caused Blood to Boil in Gilded Age Indy
When the Irish author Bram Stoker penned his popular novel Dracula in the mid-1890s, he drew on...
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A Ku Klux Quaker?
Daisy Douglass Barr, Imperial Empress of the Women of the Ku Klux Klan, circa 1923. Women are...
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Of Spirits and Soldiers
Fall is here. So it’s time to keep on the spectral side of life. On June 6, 1910, the...
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The Scientific Scrapper Who Played Uncle Tom
If you’re into sports history, you’re probably familiar with the great cyclist...
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A German Firebug?
Most Americans know nothing about the time Nazi submarines stalked the Eastern seaboard of the...
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A Bathing Revolution at the Indiana State Fair
The Locomotive, 1853. (Photo Stephen J. Taylor from the collections of the Indiana State Library.)...
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Curb Cooties and Their Moveable Porches
Ever wonder about the history and folklore of cooties? Around 1950, these mysterious critters...
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A Chinese Gravestone and a Murder Mystery at 207 Indiana Avenue
Crown Hill — America’s third-largest public cemetery — has a few hundred...
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Yeats in Irvington
W.B. Yeats in 1903, just before he visited Irvington. Photo by American photographer Alice...
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Women Take to the Skies in Jazz Age Indy
“You haven’t seen a tree until you’ve seen its shadow from the sky.” That...
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Misc Monday: Moses in Wonderland
One amazing local business coming to the rescue in the midst of the “food desert” of...
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Misc Monday: On Liberty and Whiskers
Lajos Kossuth in a daguerreotype by Southworth & Hawes, 1851 The list of famous visitors to...
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