America’s Sherlock Holmes

HailColumbia_0002

A recently acquired amateur newspaper, Hail Columbia, published in Hartford by W.H. Gillette, sent this serials cataloguer on a hunt for the full name of the editor. The paper itself gave no clues, and it was fairly typical of such things—riddles, poetry, bits and pieces of “news,” notices of other amateur newspapers and the like. ...

The Great Gliddon Mummy Unwrappings of 1850

While most people today are familiar with Egyptian mummies through various sorts of media — books, television, films, supermarket tabloids, museum exhibitions and the ubiquitous Halloween decorations —  people in mid-nineteenth century America did not have this same experience. To them, mummies were rare, mysterious relics, most often associated with the Biblical past, and few ...