In 1914, Stephen Graham, a traveler from Britain, was riding a train towards Chicago. Upon arriving at the station, he was comparing the American rates with the Russian rates and Great Britain rates: “The cost of working is more in America than in Russia, and the trains are twice as fast; but that is not enough to set off against the enormous differences in fares. . . It is absurd to compare the...
In 1914, Stephen Graham, a traveler from Britain, was tramping along the border of Northern Ohio and Southern Michigan, from Toledo to Angola, Indiana. He was entering the West, where fields were wide and square and roads were straight and flat. One evening, he stopped and took a rest at a farm, where he noticed that there was no labor but just the family working in the field. He noted in his journal,...
In 1914, Stephen Graham, an European, wrote a book describing his first journey in the United States and why he was so impressed. First, he wrote about why he came to U.S., “I came to America to see men and women and not simply bricks and mortar, to understand a national life rather than to moan over sooty cities and industrial wildernesses. Hundreds of thousands of healthy Europeans passed annually...
What were people truly gaining from venturing to America? This is what many like the writer below quested to experience and understand. Stephen Graham, a British traveller, walked about New York City and stopped to converse with an American man in a club. The man opened Graham’s eyes to the American mentality when Graham asked if it was embarrassing to take such great risks such as death and...
In 1914 in Walker County, Alabama, pellagra was prevalent. Dr. C. A. Grote, the County Helath Officer, was desperately trying to understand the cause of, and find a treatment for, the disease. He spent that year observing the disease with the assumption that it was infectious in nature. He used "preventative measures" against pellagra the same as he would against any other infectious disease. He...
In 1918, Irma Waterhouse, a graduate of Vassar College, traveled to France as a part of the Vassar relief unit under the American Red Cross, working with the American Expeditionary Forces. She wrote about her experiences in letters home, one of which was published in the Vassar school newspaper, The Miscellany. Waterhouse had graduated in 1914 and was recruited by the Vassar Canteen Unit in 1918....
In the book French woman's impression of America in the late nineteenth century Comtesse Madeleine de Bryas and her sister Jacqueline observed how women in England were craving to vote and get out of the house for once and make a change. But French women had disappointed the two sisters because they were the least feminist of all. A French woman did not want her “rights” at all:...
On August 5, 1914, American President William Jennings Bryan and Nicaraguan President Senor General Don Emiliano Chamorro met in Washington D.C. to draw up the Bryan-Chamorro Convention. This convention allowed Nicaragua to cede rights to the United States for the construction of a canal through the Lake of Nicaragua. “Whereas a Convention between the United States of America and the Republic...
It was a chilly 65 degrees in the waters of the Detroit river on a perfect Sunday afternoon in the early autumn of 1914 as revellers debated whether it was too cool for a swim in the Belle Isle bath houses. Several hundred Detroiters could brave the dip for only 15 minutes each, but swimming was not the only weekend activity available on the large, lush island of recreation for escapees of the industrial...
Can you imagine the United States without gas stations? Almost every main road today is littered with these familiar sights, all with similar architecture and design. It is hard to imagine life without these small stores, both for filling up with gasoline and for grabbing other small items. But it has not always been this way. For people living in the early 1900s, these modern fixtures...