The Leo Taxil Hoax (or how to pwn an entire church sect)

Improv Everywhere: 1860s Brooklyn Bar

Walt Whitman Reading His Own Poetry (Audio)

via http://twentytwowords.com/2013/06/07/recording-of-walt-whitman-himself-reading-a-poem-in-1890/

Alan Tew – “The Big One” (aka The People’s Court theme)

Old Newsreels of People Over 100 Years Old (in the 1920s and 1930s)

I’m sure a couple of those Russian claims are fake, but who knows. via http://misscellania.blogspot.com/2013/05/never-too-old-to-fall-in-love.html

Under Petticoats The People Will Rule

The post-title is a take-off of the South Dakota State Motto, “Under God The People Rule”.

Washington D.C., 1863

Sad Picture

I don’t know why anyone wants to see anything sad. But when I’m blue, I like to listen to down-beat music, I like to look at this photograph.

The photograph is titled: “I Scrubs” – Katie who Keeps House in West Forty-ninth Street, New York, 1892. She’s nine years old in the photo, and lived in the flat with two older siblings. “I Scrubs” is what she said when the photographer asked what sort of work she did. Katie never smiled for the photo, not cracking from her somber look.

I hope she ended up okay. The site I found this photo has little additional information about her life. She’s many years in the ground by now, so it’s difficult to say. [original link]

“When Riis met nine-year-old Katie at the 52nd Street Industrial School, he asked what kind of work she did, and she answered, ‘I scrubs.’ Katie and her three older siblings took their own flat after their mother died and their father remarried. The older children worked in a hammock factory, and Katie kept house. When asked if she would pose for this picture, which appeared in Children of the Poor, Katie ‘got right up … without a question and without a smile.’”

From Jacob Riis (55 Series)

Update: since I scheduled this to post, I printed up the picture and it hangs at my desk cubicle wall. She’s strangely reassuring, and I’m not sure why.