I went to the doctor, and the doctor said, “my son,”
I went to the doctor, and the doctor said,” my son,
You got that dust pneumony an’ you ain’t got long, not long.”
When Woody Guthrie recorded these words in 1940, he was describing the beginning of a form of pneumonia caused by breathing in too much dust. A common complaint during the “Dirty Thirties”,...
Just before World War I, John Balowich just barely avoided conscription into the Russian army by being sponsored to the US by his brothers. Beginning work in the coal mines in DuBois, PA, John faced dire circumstances both down in the mines and above ground: whatever wages he earned were owed to the company store for sustenance before he even resurfaced with his pay. Given an opportunity to escape...
In 1925, a new social sorority, founded just years before the economic downfall, the Great Depression, made its first official document, the Chi Omega Gamma Constitution. Chi Omega Gamma was founded by Helen Sheveland, Dorothy Youngberg, Lois Oline, Lorraine Ossain, Clarice Swanson, Lillian Wilson and Mildred Anderson. These women saw the need for another social organization on Augustana College’s...
Two views of the Roddick School from the Fisk University Rosenwald Database
Two undated old photographs show what the Reddick School looked like. A Gainesville Sun 2016 article reports that the late Rosa Nettles Bishop said the “original Reddick School” was down the road (the Old Dixie Highway) from the High School she had attended. (Leitner 2016)
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On January 28th, 1925, the Tennessee Legislature passed the Butler Act prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools. Shortly after the legalization of the act on May 7th, 1925, John Thomas Scopes, a science teacher at Dayton High School, willingly challenged the stance of such a regulation. Consequently, the Tennessee police arrested Scopes and charged him with the...
On September 21, 1925 in the town of Springfield, Massachusetts, a family of 8 entered and won a contest. To that family, it was likely a point of pride, something to show that they were of a good, strong, American breed. But this Fitter Families Contest, and many others just like it held throughout the United States, was a far more influential part of American history than it may seem at first...
One of the main resources for information related to the history of Furman University and Greenville Woman's College and its student body are the yearbooks. There are no surviving yearbooks of the periods of their founding (1851–1854), but catalogs of the 1920s are still mainly intact. These almanacs grant a peek into the lives of students, highlight extracurricular activities, and illustrate...
Bessie Coleman unbuckled her seatbelt, she needed to be prepared for tomorrow's big parachute jump over Jacksonville, she wanted to get used to not having it on. Willie had seen these maneuvers before – Bessie loved to push the envelope and keep everyone on the edge of their seats, and that included her manager Willie. Bessie didn't know if she quite trusted this new plane yet. She...
What is known as America’s mouthpiece first came about as an accidental discovery from a poor German immigrant with a public school education. The microphone was first invented and introduced to the public in 1877 by Emile Berliner. Berliner immigrated to the United States when he was just nineteen years old but later became known as a great entrepreneur and inventor of products that would make...
A new movement rose in the 1920s as African American Jazz began to sweep the nation. Marking an influential Harlem Renaissance, this “New Negro Movement” resembling an outburst of African American culture included literature, music, and art. The new jazz that rose during this period challenged conventional white music by emphasizing the need for more culturally inherent music; it asserted...