In this day and age, newspapers rarely print fiction. Of course, there is the occasional magical story written by a third grade class that appears every once a week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper, but for the most part, fictional stories of real substance are not published in newspapers anymore. This was not the case in the 1800's. Appearing in The Valley Star each week was...
Raised specifically for duty in the Philippines, the Thirty-third Infantry regiment of the United States Volunteers became the most famous combat unit to serve in the Philippine-American War, which lasted from 1898 to 1902. The U.S. had purchased the Philippines from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898; however, Filipinos had been fighting for their independence since 1896 and refused...
The Need for More Ships
In the late nineteenth century, as the steel and iron industries of the United States slowly became larger and more powerful, newly developed Southern industrial areas began to show interest in the building of a stronger, more powerful merchant marine. A Virginia newspaper, The Montgomery Messenger, shows great interest in the economic benefits of a more extensive...
After years of research, in 1899 German company, Friedrich Bayer & Co. began manufacturing Aspirin for release into the market as a fever reducer and pain reliever; physicians could then prescribe Aspirin to their patients in one-gram doses. Previous to this tweaked product, the most common medicine of its function was Salicylic Acid, which is contracted from Willow Tree bark, having medicinal...
The soldiers were finally leaving Macon. Little did the surrounding area know that they would be celebrating throughout their entire journey-in a destructive and fatal way. On March 8, 1899, the black men of the Tenth Immunes boarded their train with hidden firearms in tow. As the train started along, and began coming along stations, the men fired multitudes of shots out of the windows at each platform....
A breakout of smallpox in the Texas town of Laredo in 1898 eventually led to a confrontation between citizens and a group of Texas Rangers, which left one man dead, thirteen wounded and another twenty-one imprisoned. At the beginning of 1899, State health official, W.T. Blunt, ordered drastic measures- house-to-house vaccination, fumigation and burning of all personal effects suspected of contamination-...
Over a four day period in March, about a dozen African-American citizens of Little River County Arkansas were lynched or otherwise killed, as whites took vengeance after hearing rumors of a revolt among the blacks of the area. The race riot occurred in an isolated area in the southwest corner of the state and because of this remote location, it was very difficult for reporters to obtain reliable...
Newspapers, like the Portsmouth Star were filled with railroad advertisements displaying the price and rates for which a passenger could travel from Portsmouth to Virginia Beach, Petersburg, Philadelphia, and even New York with no more than a day of travel for even the farther distances. A company called the Bay Line and Pennsylvania railroad offered to take people in Norfolk to the Niagara Falls...
Proposed and adopted unanimously by the Democratic caucus on February 8, 1899, this amendment would fundamentally change the constitution of the state of North Carolina and block a large percentage of its population from employing their right to vote. The amendment was based on a plan devised by Francis D. Winston of Bertie County and largely mirrored a provision adopted in Louisiana the previous...
The January 21 edition of the Richmond Dispatch announced the opening of large cotton mills in two towns in Virginia, Manchester and Old Dominion. The mills were already constructed in both towns, but had been closed, the Marshall Mills in Manchester for eighteen months and the Dominion mills for five years. The Mills would now be run in cooperation with one another, adopting the name United Cotton...