Despite its roots in European paganism, Halloween is a thoroughly American holiday. During the Gilded Age, Americans took Halloween quite seriously, even going so far as to celebrate it wherever they happened to be–as German society soon discovered when the expatriates residing in Berlin shook[...]
Archive for October, 2009
Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free: Ellis Island
Gilded Age America saw not only a boom in millionaires, but a boom in immigration. During this era, approximately 10 million immigrants entered the United States, hungry for religious freedom and greater prosperity. The most striking of these immigrants were Eastern European Jews fleeing the bruta[...]
Of Cooking & Gender
After reading The New York Magazine’s list of the Top 20 Chef Empires, and perusing a few culinary books I’d borrowed from the library, I was struck, dumbstruck actually, that all save one of those twenty names are those of men. Many would argue that the age of modern cookery was of the [...]
October 4th, 2009 - 6:00 am § in Research
Featured Book: Victorians and Edwardians at Work
The lives of the working classes are largely ignored in today’s fiction, and if featured at all, rarely is there a full and varied perspective of their livelihoods. The glimpse given in Victorian and Edwardians At Work is both fascinating and poignant. Told in–I’d guess–nearl[...]
