Although Pacific Street was never actually toppled from its proud position as the heart of the Barbary Coast, there was a long period before the earthquake and fire of 1906 when its supremacy was seriously threatened by Kearny Street, which runs from Market Street, northward past Telegraph Hill to the waterfront. The fact that Kearny Street provided a direct route from the northern part of the city to the business and financial districts prevented it from superseding Pacific Street as the most sinful thoroughfare in San Francisco, for it increased rapidly in commercial importance, while Pacific Street, so far as legitimate business was concerned, declined steadily from the early days of the gold rush. Nevertheless, for some 30 years Kearny Street boasted many dives which were fully as low and disreputable as those for which Pacific Street was so deservedly notorious. During the middle eighteen-eighties, about a decade after the murder of Bull Run Allen and the elimination of the dashing figure of Happy Jack Harrington as a factor in underworld activities, the center of sin in San Francisco was the diagonally cut block bounded by Broadway, Kearny and Montgomery Streets - a comparatively small area, but so reeking with depravity that it was known both to the police and to its habitués as the Devil's Acre. In its issue of February 28, 1886 the San Francisco Call described it as "the resort and abiding place of the worst criminals in town," and complained that respectable citizens could not traverse Kearny Street on their way to and from business without witnessing "the utter shamelessness of the denizens."
Perhaps the most disreputable resorts in the Devil's Acre were the dozen or more bagnios, deadfalls, and cheap dancehalls on the eastern side of Kearny Street - a line of dens which was appropriately called Battle Row. Much of the Call's indignation arose from the fact that none of the windows in the brothels were equipped with shades or curtains, so that whatever went on inside was visible to whoever passed in the street. Otherwise there was nothing spectacular about these dives; they catered to the lowest of the Barbary Coast hangers-on and were chiefly remarkable for their sordidness and viciousness. Scarcely a day ever passed in which each of them was not the scene of at least one robbery and half dozen brawls, many of which ended fatally. For many years Battle Row is said to have averaged a murder a week. Equally notorious was an underground saloon at the southern end of the row.
Originally this dive was known as the Slaughterhouse, but later it was ceremoniously rechristened on a night in the latter part of 1885 when the proprietor served free drinks to all comers and at the conclusion of the festivities smashed a bottle of beer against an inebriated customer's head and announced that thenceforth his place would be called the Morgue. It was the particular rendezvous of the pimps and of the lush-workers who thronged the Devil's Acre; that is, thieves who specialized in robbing drunken men, having first, if necessary, knocked them unconscious with a slug or section of lead pipe. The Morgue was also headquarters for the many drug addicts, better known in those days as hoppies, who lived in the alleys of Chinatown and the Barbary Coast. They eked out a bare existence by panhandling, by running errands for the brothel-keepers and inmates and by collecting wood and old boxes, which they sold to Chinese merchants and householders. Occasionally they earned a few pennies by showing the needle marks in their arms to tourists.
Few of the hoppies could afford a hypodermic needle; instead, they used an ordinary medicine dropper, filling it with cocaine or morphine and forcing the point into their flesh. They obtained most of their supplies of narcotics at an all-night drug store in Grant Avenue where enough cocaine or morphine for an injection cost from 10¢ to 15¢. (Copyright 1933)
Monday, June 25, 2007
Things It Takes Most Of Us 50 years to learn
1. The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it.
2. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight-saving time.
3. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
4. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers.
5. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is: age 11.
6. There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."
7. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
8. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."
9. The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.
10. If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and he decides to deliver a message to humanity, he will NOT use as his messenger a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle or in some cases, really bad make-up too.
11. You should not confuse your career with your life.
12. A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter/janitor, is not a nice person.
13. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
14. When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
15. Your true friends love you, anyway.
16. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
Posted by steve at 7:31 AM 4 comments
2. You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight-saving time.
3. You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
4. The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers.
5. There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is: age 11.
6. There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness."
7. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
8. If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be "meetings."
9. The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.
10. If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and he decides to deliver a message to humanity, he will NOT use as his messenger a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle or in some cases, really bad make-up too.
11. You should not confuse your career with your life.
12. A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter/janitor, is not a nice person.
13. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
14. When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
15. Your true friends love you, anyway.
16. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
Posted by steve at 7:31 AM 4 comments
The Ten Commandments of Mindfulness
2.25.2007
The Ten Commandments of Mindfulness
1. Yearn not for a body free of disease and suffering, because without going through pain and illness, sundry desires are easily awakened.2. Wish not for a life free of mishaps and obstacles, because without them one tends to become arrogant and egotistic.3. Pray not for a quick shortcut regarding spiritual introspect, because without excruciating effort, one becomes short-learning.4. Fear not the haunting disturbance of evil while accumulating spiritual strength, because without them one’s determination does not grow solid strong.5. Hope not for easy success in one’s work, because without difficulties and failures, one tends to undervalue others and become overly proud.6. Build not relationships on selfish gain, because a relationship based on profit has lost its genuine meaning.7. Look not for a universal consensus regarding one’s personal opinion, because complete adoption to a single opinion will render narrow mindedness.8. Expect not repayment or reward from others for one’s services, because calculation and expectation contradicts true service.9. Engage not irrationally into profitable attractions, because jumping too quickly into temptation may well blind wisdom.10. Stir not at being victim of injustice, because eagerness to clarify reputation belongs to an ego too attached to loose.Translated into English by Tam Lac Jessica A. Tran
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Tags: Buddhist, inspiration, spirit
The Ten Commandments of Mindfulness
1. Yearn not for a body free of disease and suffering, because without going through pain and illness, sundry desires are easily awakened.2. Wish not for a life free of mishaps and obstacles, because without them one tends to become arrogant and egotistic.3. Pray not for a quick shortcut regarding spiritual introspect, because without excruciating effort, one becomes short-learning.4. Fear not the haunting disturbance of evil while accumulating spiritual strength, because without them one’s determination does not grow solid strong.5. Hope not for easy success in one’s work, because without difficulties and failures, one tends to undervalue others and become overly proud.6. Build not relationships on selfish gain, because a relationship based on profit has lost its genuine meaning.7. Look not for a universal consensus regarding one’s personal opinion, because complete adoption to a single opinion will render narrow mindedness.8. Expect not repayment or reward from others for one’s services, because calculation and expectation contradicts true service.9. Engage not irrationally into profitable attractions, because jumping too quickly into temptation may well blind wisdom.10. Stir not at being victim of injustice, because eagerness to clarify reputation belongs to an ego too attached to loose.Translated into English by Tam Lac Jessica A. Tran
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checkFull("post-" + "9002069005602610579")
Tags: Buddhist, inspiration, spirit
RECREATION, SPORTS, AND GAMES
By 1750 sport and recreation had become an important part of everyday life in colonial America. The settlers who came to North America brought with them the love of games and amusements that characterized "Merrie Olde England," but recreation had to give way to the creation of a new society in an intimidating and dangerous environment. Early on in both the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Jamestown, leaders felt compelled to "suffer no Idle persons" and to adopt laws "in detestation of idleness." During the early decades of settlement, strict proscriptions against dancing, bowling, dice and cards, and the playing of games of ball were imposed, although enforcement was sporadic. As the colonies developed stable economic and social foundations, however, such prohibitions broke down and colonists of all classes engaged in a wide range of games and amusements.
By the mid-1700s distinctive regional patterns for individual and organized sport had taken root. Attempts to enforce seventeenth-century laws prohibiting popular leisure activities had long since ended. Interest in sports grew with rising income levels and a growing colonial economy that made leisure activities more attractive. To their credit the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut had sought, with varying degrees of success, to outlaw "butcherly sports" like cockfighting and animal baiting, although it has been said that they banned them not so much because of the sufferings of animals but the pleasure the practice gave spectators. Such prohibitions grew out of the essential work ethic of Calvinism: games might provide amusement, but they detracted from the labor that had to be accomplished in field and shop. Nonetheless, the erosion of theocratic control meant that New Englanders increasingly enjoyed their dancing, cards, and dice, even an occasional horse race. Children were encouraged to engage in vigorous activities, especially hunting and fishing for the boys. Young males also played a ball and stick game of "rounders," the precursor to baseball, and "foot-ball," which was somewhat akin to modern soccer and rugby. Swimming was a popular summer pastime, as was ice skating in winter. Girls were generally cautioned against vigorous exercise after reaching puberty and encouraged to prepare for early marriage by playing with dolls and learning from their mothers the skills of housekeeping and cooking. By the eve of the Revolution, New Englanders regularly participated in dancing and parlor games, challenging traditional Puritan values. In the mid-1750s the young Boston lawyer John Adams found such dalliances disconcerting but inevitable: "Let others waste their bloom of life at the card or billiards table among rakes and fools," he grumbled. Nor did he appreciate the popular pastime of dancing: "I never knew a dancer good for anything else."
In the middle colonies the Dutch Calvinist and Quaker influences initially put a damper on exuberant play, but later people enjoyed whist, croquet, tennis, lawn bowling, and badminton, even a rudimentary game played with "gouff sticks." In both New England and the middle colonies, taverns served as a center for organized events, their owners arranging horse races, cockfights, wrestling matches, and bowling contests to attract customers. The taverns also were the natural home for ongoing games of checkers, dice, darts, shuffleboard, and cards, serving as precursors of the organized men's athletic clubs that would appear in the mid-nineteenth century. The increased number of laws passed during the early eighteenth century in New England prohibiting popular recreations suggests that more people were engaging in these activities more often.
As the Calvinist leadership valiantly but vainly sought to focus its people on a life of solemn industriousness, conversely the dominant Anglican culture in the Tidewater encouraged the playing of games. From the earliest days of settlement, members of the southern aristocracy consciously sought to emulate the landed aristocracy of England, where life revolved around horses, hunting, drinking, and gambling. The slave-owning classes of Maryland and Virginia felt compelled to work hard at their play because their slaves did the arduous work. Women supervised the household and went on continuous rounds of visiting, card parties, balls, and banquets; men oversaw work in the tobacco fields and enjoyed gambling (often high stakes) at cards, dice, backgammon, cockfights, lawn bowling, and especially horse races.
Quality horses were central to the lives of the slave-owning class. Ownership of a spirited and elegant horse in colonial America was the equivalent of possession of a sleek automobile in the twentieth century—it set a gentleman apart. In emulation of the British country gentry, the southern male aristocrat relished riding to the hounds in pursuit of a frightened fox. George Washington was proud of his stable of fast horses and his pack of trained hounds, and he imported the best hunting firearms from England along with buckskin riding breeches and brilliantly colored riding frocks. His diaries report frequent forays for "ducking" and fox hunting. During the first two months of 1769, for example, he rode to the hounds no less than fifteen times, and he enjoyed the many balls, receptions, and banquets that he attended in Alexandria, Williamsburg, and Annapolis. Thomas Jefferson equally enjoyed the life of a gentleman slave owner: "I was often thrown into the society of horse-racers, card-players, fox hunters," he once wrote approvingly. His advice to a friend on the perfect life was, "Get a pair of keen horses, practice the law in the same courts, and drive about to all the dances in the county together." That Virginia common law included a code for the conduct of races and the settling of wagers afterward attests to their centrality in the life of colonial Virginia. After the American Revolution the first thoroughbred horses of Arabian origin were imported from England, and urban newspapers would report as early as 1820 on major races conducted at enclosed tracks in New York and Virginia.
Lower-class whites in the South pursued their own games, largely unfettered by the religious constraints of the northern colonies. At small roadside taverns they enjoyed food and plenty of drink, quoits, cards, dice, and shuffleboard. Tavern owners attracted business by holding wrestling matches and bare-knuckle fights, cockfights, and dog baitings. Similarly, in the middle and northern colonies during the eighteenth century people enjoyed drinking and wagering at table games in taverns. One popular entertainment was "gander pulling," at which a tavern owner would tie a poor goose to a tree limb, its head slathered in grease, and patrons, fueled by hearty drink, rode past on their horses in an attempt to pull off the squawking bird's head. The winner got to take the goose home for dinner.
On the eve of the American Revolution, sporting events remained informal and local, with little resemblance to the heavily organized and regulated amateur and professional sporting activities of today. Except for firearms, most equipment was handmade, and rules were created locally. Many contests—bare-knuckle fights, foot races, shooting contests—often occurred spontaneously as a means to resolve disputes but also provided amusement for onlookers. In a predominantly rural society, work naturally melded with play. The average citizen found amusement in corn huskings, quilting bees, and community harvests, frequently with music and dancing. Local fairs often featured demonstrations of strength and agility necessary in everyday life—wrestling, target shooting, plowing contests, horsemanship, wood cutting, log rolling. Often the distinction between work and play disappeared entirely as community activities like a barn raising included socialization, demonstration of carpentry skills, and physical prowess. Hunting and fishing required special skills and merged the worlds of work and play until they were indistinguishable.
The Revolutionary era put a damper on popular sport and recreational activities. Opposition to colonial rule from abroad inspired attacks on members of the native privileged class, who were closely associated with the sporting life. Thus horse racing virtually ceased after the First Continental Congress passed legislation urging the states to "discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gambling, cockfighting, exhibitions of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and amusements." Several state legislatures enacted similar legislation, and informal Revolutionary groups, such as the Sons of Liberty, served as extralegal enforcers of these prohibitions. The ardent revolutionary Sam Adams urged that each of the thirteen states seek to become a "Christian Sparta." This zealous republican Revolutionary spirit spent itself by the late 1780s, after which the American people comfortably resumed their public pursuit of amusement.
The end of the War for Independence unleashed a heavy migration into the trans-Appalachian frontier. There popular recreations, such as target shooting, often revolved around hunting. Other activities, especially wrestling, emphasized physical strength. The peculiar phenomenon of "rough-and-tumble" developed in western Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. A particularly violent form of human combat, it was part wrestling, part fisticuffs, part pure mayhem that included kicking, clawing, and gouging. Tearing off body parts—testicles in particular—was a primary objective, although the ultimate victory occurred when an adversary's eyeball was extracted. To that end, local champions grew their fingernails long and filed them to a sharp point. These gruesome contests were sometimes scheduled at shooting matches, fairs, and by entrepreneurial tavern owners, but most often they simply grew out of a dispute between two hot-blooded young men who saw their honor as at stake and sought to gain "respect." Spectators joined in the fun, naturally betting on the outcome. Visitors to the old Southwest long after the Civil War reported observing surprising numbers of aging men with badly scarred faces and empty eye sockets.
Following the War of 1812 the growing tide of modernism altered popular recreations. By 1830 machine technology, steam power, and major innovations in transportation had led to factory manufacturing and a new urban environment. The emerging corporate economy influenced the games Americans played. Local and regional sports organizations were formed to establish standards of play. The time when sporting events were spontaneous extensions of the rigors of daily life and labor would be replaced by structure, bureaucratic organization, written rules, and formal records. A wealthy gentlemen no longer rode his own prize quarter horse in an informal sprint for glory, but instead owned a thoroughbred ridden by a professional jockey wearing attire specifically prescribed by the Jockey Club of America. Newspapers and magazines began to provide national coverage of horse racing and other sporting events, encouraging the standardization of rules, methods for setting betting odds, and the keeping of records.
By 1820 the indigenous middle-American sport of harness racing emerged. It was first reported in New York City in 1803. Men gravitated after work to the five-mile graveled stretch of Third Avenue to show off their family horse and buggy. The animals were of common stock, not the fancy thoroughbreds of the elitist Jockey Club set. Informal races often ended at one of the many taverns along the thoroughfare. By the 1820s this "roadster" phenomenon had given way to oval tracks for "trotters" where organized competition was scheduled. The new sport of harness racing quickly spread; by the 1830s several race tracks for trotters and pacers had been opened in the West and South. Harness racing remained a sport of the middle class, becoming a constant at county fairs, an American tradition that continues to this day.
Not only horses attracted public attention. In Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, rowing clubs were formed to sponsor various forms of small craft racing as well as to provide exercise for the desk-bound, urban middle-class male. Longdistance foot racing—popularly known as "pedestrianism"—was also the rage. In 1835 a twenty-four-year-old Connecticut farmer, Henry Stannard, thrilled the nation when he won $1,000 put up by New York's leading sportsman, John Cox Stevens, by finishing ten miles in less than the prescribed sixty minutes; Stannard beat the clock by just twelve seconds.
By 1830 sport in America had thus begun to make a grand transition from an emphasis on localism and spontaneity to standardization, routinization, and organization. By 1845 the simple informal game of rounders played by youngsters in colonial times had been transformed into the formal game of baseball—complete with written rules, an umpire dressed in judicial black, and manufactured equipment—played before cheering spectators by grown men wearing distinctive uniforms. Within another decade the "New York City Game" had become professionalized with top players now being paid by team owners who charged spectators admission to see the action.
See also Class: Development of the Working Class; Class: Overview; Domestic Life; Firearms (Nonmilitary); Gambling; Games and Toys, Children's; Work: Work Ethic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adelman, Melvin L. A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820–1870. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Daniels, Bruce C. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.
Dulles, Foster Rhea. A History of Recreation: America Learns to Play. 2nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965.
Gorn, Elliott J. "Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Back Country." American Historical Review 90 (February 1985): 18–43.
Struna, Nancy L. People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Richard O. Davies
By the mid-1700s distinctive regional patterns for individual and organized sport had taken root. Attempts to enforce seventeenth-century laws prohibiting popular leisure activities had long since ended. Interest in sports grew with rising income levels and a growing colonial economy that made leisure activities more attractive. To their credit the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut had sought, with varying degrees of success, to outlaw "butcherly sports" like cockfighting and animal baiting, although it has been said that they banned them not so much because of the sufferings of animals but the pleasure the practice gave spectators. Such prohibitions grew out of the essential work ethic of Calvinism: games might provide amusement, but they detracted from the labor that had to be accomplished in field and shop. Nonetheless, the erosion of theocratic control meant that New Englanders increasingly enjoyed their dancing, cards, and dice, even an occasional horse race. Children were encouraged to engage in vigorous activities, especially hunting and fishing for the boys. Young males also played a ball and stick game of "rounders," the precursor to baseball, and "foot-ball," which was somewhat akin to modern soccer and rugby. Swimming was a popular summer pastime, as was ice skating in winter. Girls were generally cautioned against vigorous exercise after reaching puberty and encouraged to prepare for early marriage by playing with dolls and learning from their mothers the skills of housekeeping and cooking. By the eve of the Revolution, New Englanders regularly participated in dancing and parlor games, challenging traditional Puritan values. In the mid-1750s the young Boston lawyer John Adams found such dalliances disconcerting but inevitable: "Let others waste their bloom of life at the card or billiards table among rakes and fools," he grumbled. Nor did he appreciate the popular pastime of dancing: "I never knew a dancer good for anything else."
In the middle colonies the Dutch Calvinist and Quaker influences initially put a damper on exuberant play, but later people enjoyed whist, croquet, tennis, lawn bowling, and badminton, even a rudimentary game played with "gouff sticks." In both New England and the middle colonies, taverns served as a center for organized events, their owners arranging horse races, cockfights, wrestling matches, and bowling contests to attract customers. The taverns also were the natural home for ongoing games of checkers, dice, darts, shuffleboard, and cards, serving as precursors of the organized men's athletic clubs that would appear in the mid-nineteenth century. The increased number of laws passed during the early eighteenth century in New England prohibiting popular recreations suggests that more people were engaging in these activities more often.
As the Calvinist leadership valiantly but vainly sought to focus its people on a life of solemn industriousness, conversely the dominant Anglican culture in the Tidewater encouraged the playing of games. From the earliest days of settlement, members of the southern aristocracy consciously sought to emulate the landed aristocracy of England, where life revolved around horses, hunting, drinking, and gambling. The slave-owning classes of Maryland and Virginia felt compelled to work hard at their play because their slaves did the arduous work. Women supervised the household and went on continuous rounds of visiting, card parties, balls, and banquets; men oversaw work in the tobacco fields and enjoyed gambling (often high stakes) at cards, dice, backgammon, cockfights, lawn bowling, and especially horse races.
Quality horses were central to the lives of the slave-owning class. Ownership of a spirited and elegant horse in colonial America was the equivalent of possession of a sleek automobile in the twentieth century—it set a gentleman apart. In emulation of the British country gentry, the southern male aristocrat relished riding to the hounds in pursuit of a frightened fox. George Washington was proud of his stable of fast horses and his pack of trained hounds, and he imported the best hunting firearms from England along with buckskin riding breeches and brilliantly colored riding frocks. His diaries report frequent forays for "ducking" and fox hunting. During the first two months of 1769, for example, he rode to the hounds no less than fifteen times, and he enjoyed the many balls, receptions, and banquets that he attended in Alexandria, Williamsburg, and Annapolis. Thomas Jefferson equally enjoyed the life of a gentleman slave owner: "I was often thrown into the society of horse-racers, card-players, fox hunters," he once wrote approvingly. His advice to a friend on the perfect life was, "Get a pair of keen horses, practice the law in the same courts, and drive about to all the dances in the county together." That Virginia common law included a code for the conduct of races and the settling of wagers afterward attests to their centrality in the life of colonial Virginia. After the American Revolution the first thoroughbred horses of Arabian origin were imported from England, and urban newspapers would report as early as 1820 on major races conducted at enclosed tracks in New York and Virginia.
Lower-class whites in the South pursued their own games, largely unfettered by the religious constraints of the northern colonies. At small roadside taverns they enjoyed food and plenty of drink, quoits, cards, dice, and shuffleboard. Tavern owners attracted business by holding wrestling matches and bare-knuckle fights, cockfights, and dog baitings. Similarly, in the middle and northern colonies during the eighteenth century people enjoyed drinking and wagering at table games in taverns. One popular entertainment was "gander pulling," at which a tavern owner would tie a poor goose to a tree limb, its head slathered in grease, and patrons, fueled by hearty drink, rode past on their horses in an attempt to pull off the squawking bird's head. The winner got to take the goose home for dinner.
On the eve of the American Revolution, sporting events remained informal and local, with little resemblance to the heavily organized and regulated amateur and professional sporting activities of today. Except for firearms, most equipment was handmade, and rules were created locally. Many contests—bare-knuckle fights, foot races, shooting contests—often occurred spontaneously as a means to resolve disputes but also provided amusement for onlookers. In a predominantly rural society, work naturally melded with play. The average citizen found amusement in corn huskings, quilting bees, and community harvests, frequently with music and dancing. Local fairs often featured demonstrations of strength and agility necessary in everyday life—wrestling, target shooting, plowing contests, horsemanship, wood cutting, log rolling. Often the distinction between work and play disappeared entirely as community activities like a barn raising included socialization, demonstration of carpentry skills, and physical prowess. Hunting and fishing required special skills and merged the worlds of work and play until they were indistinguishable.
The Revolutionary era put a damper on popular sport and recreational activities. Opposition to colonial rule from abroad inspired attacks on members of the native privileged class, who were closely associated with the sporting life. Thus horse racing virtually ceased after the First Continental Congress passed legislation urging the states to "discountenance and discourage every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gambling, cockfighting, exhibitions of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and amusements." Several state legislatures enacted similar legislation, and informal Revolutionary groups, such as the Sons of Liberty, served as extralegal enforcers of these prohibitions. The ardent revolutionary Sam Adams urged that each of the thirteen states seek to become a "Christian Sparta." This zealous republican Revolutionary spirit spent itself by the late 1780s, after which the American people comfortably resumed their public pursuit of amusement.
The end of the War for Independence unleashed a heavy migration into the trans-Appalachian frontier. There popular recreations, such as target shooting, often revolved around hunting. Other activities, especially wrestling, emphasized physical strength. The peculiar phenomenon of "rough-and-tumble" developed in western Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. A particularly violent form of human combat, it was part wrestling, part fisticuffs, part pure mayhem that included kicking, clawing, and gouging. Tearing off body parts—testicles in particular—was a primary objective, although the ultimate victory occurred when an adversary's eyeball was extracted. To that end, local champions grew their fingernails long and filed them to a sharp point. These gruesome contests were sometimes scheduled at shooting matches, fairs, and by entrepreneurial tavern owners, but most often they simply grew out of a dispute between two hot-blooded young men who saw their honor as at stake and sought to gain "respect." Spectators joined in the fun, naturally betting on the outcome. Visitors to the old Southwest long after the Civil War reported observing surprising numbers of aging men with badly scarred faces and empty eye sockets.
Following the War of 1812 the growing tide of modernism altered popular recreations. By 1830 machine technology, steam power, and major innovations in transportation had led to factory manufacturing and a new urban environment. The emerging corporate economy influenced the games Americans played. Local and regional sports organizations were formed to establish standards of play. The time when sporting events were spontaneous extensions of the rigors of daily life and labor would be replaced by structure, bureaucratic organization, written rules, and formal records. A wealthy gentlemen no longer rode his own prize quarter horse in an informal sprint for glory, but instead owned a thoroughbred ridden by a professional jockey wearing attire specifically prescribed by the Jockey Club of America. Newspapers and magazines began to provide national coverage of horse racing and other sporting events, encouraging the standardization of rules, methods for setting betting odds, and the keeping of records.
By 1820 the indigenous middle-American sport of harness racing emerged. It was first reported in New York City in 1803. Men gravitated after work to the five-mile graveled stretch of Third Avenue to show off their family horse and buggy. The animals were of common stock, not the fancy thoroughbreds of the elitist Jockey Club set. Informal races often ended at one of the many taverns along the thoroughfare. By the 1820s this "roadster" phenomenon had given way to oval tracks for "trotters" where organized competition was scheduled. The new sport of harness racing quickly spread; by the 1830s several race tracks for trotters and pacers had been opened in the West and South. Harness racing remained a sport of the middle class, becoming a constant at county fairs, an American tradition that continues to this day.
Not only horses attracted public attention. In Boston, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, rowing clubs were formed to sponsor various forms of small craft racing as well as to provide exercise for the desk-bound, urban middle-class male. Longdistance foot racing—popularly known as "pedestrianism"—was also the rage. In 1835 a twenty-four-year-old Connecticut farmer, Henry Stannard, thrilled the nation when he won $1,000 put up by New York's leading sportsman, John Cox Stevens, by finishing ten miles in less than the prescribed sixty minutes; Stannard beat the clock by just twelve seconds.
By 1830 sport in America had thus begun to make a grand transition from an emphasis on localism and spontaneity to standardization, routinization, and organization. By 1845 the simple informal game of rounders played by youngsters in colonial times had been transformed into the formal game of baseball—complete with written rules, an umpire dressed in judicial black, and manufactured equipment—played before cheering spectators by grown men wearing distinctive uniforms. Within another decade the "New York City Game" had become professionalized with top players now being paid by team owners who charged spectators admission to see the action.
See also Class: Development of the Working Class; Class: Overview; Domestic Life; Firearms (Nonmilitary); Gambling; Games and Toys, Children's; Work: Work Ethic.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adelman, Melvin L. A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820–1870. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
Daniels, Bruce C. Puritans at Play: Leisure and Recreation in Colonial New England. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.
Dulles, Foster Rhea. A History of Recreation: America Learns to Play. 2nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965.
Gorn, Elliott J. "Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Back Country." American Historical Review 90 (February 1985): 18–43.
Struna, Nancy L. People of Prowess: Sport, Leisure, and Labor in Early Anglo-America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996.
Richard O. Davies
Saloon Girls
The saloon paintings of the Wild West were hardly what we would call nudes today. By the standards of the time and place, the were certainly on the edge, but far more revealing pictures commonly appear in high school and middle school text books, and have for years. The paintings usually featured women reclining, with some sort of veil covering her hips.
Those who remember the TV series Gunsmoke (one of the few TV westerns to show a small town in the Old West in some degree of accuracy) have seen what most saloons were like in towns of the Old West. Most of those towns had (and some still have) a church on the main street, and most of the ones that don't have a street named "Church Street." The early saloons, the ones that preceded the establishment of a town, were ramshackle buildings unlikely to have any decoration, but the later ones were often the most expensive buildings in the town (until it was large enough to have a bank).
There were two types of “bad girls” in the West. The “worst” types, according to the “proper” women, were the many painted ladies who made their living by offering paid sex in the numerous brothels, parlor houses, and cribs of the western towns. The second type of “bad girl” were the saloon and dance hall women, who contrary to some popular thinking, were generally not prostitutes -- this tended to occur only in the very shabbiest class of saloons. Though the “respectable” ladies considered the saloon girls “fallen”, most of the girls wouldn’t be caught dead associating with an actual prostitute.
Saloon and Dance Hall Girls
A saloon or dancehall girl’s job was to brighten the evenings of the many lonely men of the western towns. In the Old West, men usually outnumbered women by at least three to one – sometimes more, as was the case in California in1850, where 90% of the population was male.
Starved for female companionship, the saloon girl would sing for the men, dance with them, and talk to them – inducing them to remain in the bar, buying drinks and patronizing the games.
Not all saloons employed saloon girls, such as in Dodge City’s north side of Front Street, which was the “respectable” side, where both Saloon girls and gambling were barred, and featured music and billiards as the chief amusements to accompany drinking.
Most saloon girls were refugees from farms or mills, lured by posters and handbills advertising high wages, easy work, and fine clothing. Many were widows or needy women of good morals, forced to earn a living in an era that offered few means for women to do so.
Earning as much as $10 per week, most saloon girls also made a commission from the drinks that they sold. Whiskey sold to the customer was generally marked up 30-60% over its wholesale price. Commonly drinks bought for the girls would only be cold tea or colored sugar water served in a shot glass; however, the customers were charged the full price of whiskey, which could range from ten to seventy-five cents a shot.
Saloon girls wore brightly colored ruffled skirts that were scandalously short for the time – mid-shin or knee-length. Under the bell-shaped skirts, could be seen colorfully hued petticoats that barely reached their kid boots that were often adorned with tassels. More often than not, their arms and shoulders were bare, their bodices cut low over their bosoms, and their dresses decorated with sequins and fringe. Silk, lace, or net stockings were held up by garters, which were often gifts from their admirers.
The term “painted ladies” was coined because the “girls” had the audacity to wear make-up and dye their hair. Many were armed with pistols or jeweled daggers concealed in their boot tops or tucked between her breasts to keep the boisterous cowboys in line.
Most saloon girls were considered "good" women by the men they danced and talked with; often receiving lavish gifts from admirers. In most places the proprieties of treating the saloon girls as “ladies” were strictly observed, as much because Western men tended to revere all women, as because the women or the saloon keeper demanded it. Any man who mistreated these women would quickly become a social outcast, and if he insulted one he would very likely be killed. -
Most certainly, there were the "wild" saloons in the Old West, but most of those died out with the formation of a town. The earlier saloons were unlikely to be in a location where women lived, let alone walked by, so a door would be unnecessary to prevent them or anyone else from seeing in. The people who founded a town were certainly aware that, in order the town to be successful and businesses thrive, families must attracted, and families meant a certain degree of law and order must be maintained.
Those who remember the TV series Gunsmoke (one of the few TV westerns to show a small town in the Old West in some degree of accuracy) have seen what most saloons were like in towns of the Old West. Most of those towns had (and some still have) a church on the main street, and most of the ones that don't have a street named "Church Street." The early saloons, the ones that preceded the establishment of a town, were ramshackle buildings unlikely to have any decoration, but the later ones were often the most expensive buildings in the town (until it was large enough to have a bank).
There were two types of “bad girls” in the West. The “worst” types, according to the “proper” women, were the many painted ladies who made their living by offering paid sex in the numerous brothels, parlor houses, and cribs of the western towns. The second type of “bad girl” were the saloon and dance hall women, who contrary to some popular thinking, were generally not prostitutes -- this tended to occur only in the very shabbiest class of saloons. Though the “respectable” ladies considered the saloon girls “fallen”, most of the girls wouldn’t be caught dead associating with an actual prostitute.
Saloon and Dance Hall Girls
A saloon or dancehall girl’s job was to brighten the evenings of the many lonely men of the western towns. In the Old West, men usually outnumbered women by at least three to one – sometimes more, as was the case in California in1850, where 90% of the population was male.
Starved for female companionship, the saloon girl would sing for the men, dance with them, and talk to them – inducing them to remain in the bar, buying drinks and patronizing the games.
Not all saloons employed saloon girls, such as in Dodge City’s north side of Front Street, which was the “respectable” side, where both Saloon girls and gambling were barred, and featured music and billiards as the chief amusements to accompany drinking.
Most saloon girls were refugees from farms or mills, lured by posters and handbills advertising high wages, easy work, and fine clothing. Many were widows or needy women of good morals, forced to earn a living in an era that offered few means for women to do so.
Earning as much as $10 per week, most saloon girls also made a commission from the drinks that they sold. Whiskey sold to the customer was generally marked up 30-60% over its wholesale price. Commonly drinks bought for the girls would only be cold tea or colored sugar water served in a shot glass; however, the customers were charged the full price of whiskey, which could range from ten to seventy-five cents a shot.
Saloon girls wore brightly colored ruffled skirts that were scandalously short for the time – mid-shin or knee-length. Under the bell-shaped skirts, could be seen colorfully hued petticoats that barely reached their kid boots that were often adorned with tassels. More often than not, their arms and shoulders were bare, their bodices cut low over their bosoms, and their dresses decorated with sequins and fringe. Silk, lace, or net stockings were held up by garters, which were often gifts from their admirers.
The term “painted ladies” was coined because the “girls” had the audacity to wear make-up and dye their hair. Many were armed with pistols or jeweled daggers concealed in their boot tops or tucked between her breasts to keep the boisterous cowboys in line.
Most saloon girls were considered "good" women by the men they danced and talked with; often receiving lavish gifts from admirers. In most places the proprieties of treating the saloon girls as “ladies” were strictly observed, as much because Western men tended to revere all women, as because the women or the saloon keeper demanded it. Any man who mistreated these women would quickly become a social outcast, and if he insulted one he would very likely be killed. -
Most certainly, there were the "wild" saloons in the Old West, but most of those died out with the formation of a town. The earlier saloons were unlikely to be in a location where women lived, let alone walked by, so a door would be unnecessary to prevent them or anyone else from seeing in. The people who founded a town were certainly aware that, in order the town to be successful and businesses thrive, families must attracted, and families meant a certain degree of law and order must be maintained.
Writing Fiction that Sells
As the craft of writing has evolved, it has naturally formed the plot structure most pleasant to the human mind. This is the Three Act Structure, and it applies to short stories, novels and screenplays alike. What follows is the general flow of the Three Act Structure.
ACT ONE – The Setup
In Act One the protagonist meets all of the characters in the story. We also learn the main problem of the story. Everybody can usually plot Act One because we have to know the problem to have the idea. The trick in Act One is to keep it interesting. Don't just start rolling out story points. Start at the most interesting point, where there is conflict and excitement, and help the audience sort it out.
Act One is a preparation act for the viewer or reader. This is where they learn about the central character – whether they like him, whether they care about him, and whether they care about his dilemma.
The protagonist may be the hero or the villain, depending on whose story is more interesting, whose story drives the plot forward.
You should open Act One with a bang. Don't start at "Once upon a time." Open with a hook.
By the end of Act One you should also have introduced the protagonist, the antagonist and set up all of the secondary character relationships.
Here are some general guidelines for the objectives of Act One.
1. Establish the status quo for the protagonist.
2. Present the initial impetus for a move or change by the protagonist.
3. Ask the central question of the book. Summarize your book in 25 words or less and you will find the central question of your book.
4. Define the wants of the major characters and their reasons for desiring these things.
5. Lay the groundwork and establish the stakes for the chase to occur in Act 2.
ACT TWO – The Chase
This is the most important act in the drama because you have the two most important structural moves in the story.
1. It complicates the initial problem.
2. It defeats the protagonist at its end. The complication usually comes at the top of Act Two.
The problem that we already set up in Act One, now has to become much more dangerous and difficult.
A good way to design the complication is to let it be a piece of the back-story that has remained hidden until Act Two. The protagonist must then start to try to solve this bigger, more complicated problem, while the adversaries make moves to defeat them. Your adversaries must be in motion. Adversaries should not be standing around, waiting to be caught.
The end of Act Two marks the destruction of the protagonist’s plan.
At the end of Act Two the protagonist should be almost destroyed, and at the lowest point in the drama, either physically and/or emotionally. He (or she) is flat on his back and it looks like there is no way he can succeed.
Here are some general guidelines for the objectives of Act Two.
1. The protagonist behaves differently, more assertive
2. The protagonist tries to do the right thing, but is foiled by the antagonist three times. These are called reversals. Think of any story and spot the reversals. The overall conflict has three reversals and one conclusion.
3. Use the information presented in Act One. This is the groundwork we discussed during Act One. Objects and facts that appeared in the background of Act One now take on new meanings significant to the plot.
4. Make the chase unpredictable, stimulating, engaging and unique.
5. Rely heavily on physical action.
6. Put the characters in interesting situations and locations, ensuring those situations and locations relate to the hero’s intent.
ACT THREE
This is simply the resolution of the problem. From the rubble laying around him/her, the protagonist picks up a piece of string and follows it to the eventual conclusion of the story. Some stories have downbeat endings, where the protagonist learns a lesson, but dies or is defeated.
Of course, there is no precise formula for success. It is always possible to alter this Three Act Structure, but remember, if you break these plot rules, you should at least know why you are doing it.
Here are some general guidelines for the objectives of Act Three.
1. Answer the central question of the book.
2. Fulfill all the promises made in Acts One and Two.
3. Answer all questions asked in Acts One and Two – no loose ends.
4. The protagonist must undergo a change to conquer a larger version of something that conquered him during Act 1.
For more information on writing and selling fiction, please visit www.new-online-bookstore.com and go to New Authors, where we have a free, 8-segment tutorial on the craft of writing and a 5 segment series on internet marketing – both free.
Patrick Dent
New Online Bookstore
New Books by New Authors Expect a little more…And get it.
http://www.new-online-bookstore.com
mailto:info@new-online-bookstore.com
By Patrick Dent
Published: 3/3/2006
ACT ONE – The Setup
In Act One the protagonist meets all of the characters in the story. We also learn the main problem of the story. Everybody can usually plot Act One because we have to know the problem to have the idea. The trick in Act One is to keep it interesting. Don't just start rolling out story points. Start at the most interesting point, where there is conflict and excitement, and help the audience sort it out.
Act One is a preparation act for the viewer or reader. This is where they learn about the central character – whether they like him, whether they care about him, and whether they care about his dilemma.
The protagonist may be the hero or the villain, depending on whose story is more interesting, whose story drives the plot forward.
You should open Act One with a bang. Don't start at "Once upon a time." Open with a hook.
By the end of Act One you should also have introduced the protagonist, the antagonist and set up all of the secondary character relationships.
Here are some general guidelines for the objectives of Act One.
1. Establish the status quo for the protagonist.
2. Present the initial impetus for a move or change by the protagonist.
3. Ask the central question of the book. Summarize your book in 25 words or less and you will find the central question of your book.
4. Define the wants of the major characters and their reasons for desiring these things.
5. Lay the groundwork and establish the stakes for the chase to occur in Act 2.
ACT TWO – The Chase
This is the most important act in the drama because you have the two most important structural moves in the story.
1. It complicates the initial problem.
2. It defeats the protagonist at its end. The complication usually comes at the top of Act Two.
The problem that we already set up in Act One, now has to become much more dangerous and difficult.
A good way to design the complication is to let it be a piece of the back-story that has remained hidden until Act Two. The protagonist must then start to try to solve this bigger, more complicated problem, while the adversaries make moves to defeat them. Your adversaries must be in motion. Adversaries should not be standing around, waiting to be caught.
The end of Act Two marks the destruction of the protagonist’s plan.
At the end of Act Two the protagonist should be almost destroyed, and at the lowest point in the drama, either physically and/or emotionally. He (or she) is flat on his back and it looks like there is no way he can succeed.
Here are some general guidelines for the objectives of Act Two.
1. The protagonist behaves differently, more assertive
2. The protagonist tries to do the right thing, but is foiled by the antagonist three times. These are called reversals. Think of any story and spot the reversals. The overall conflict has three reversals and one conclusion.
3. Use the information presented in Act One. This is the groundwork we discussed during Act One. Objects and facts that appeared in the background of Act One now take on new meanings significant to the plot.
4. Make the chase unpredictable, stimulating, engaging and unique.
5. Rely heavily on physical action.
6. Put the characters in interesting situations and locations, ensuring those situations and locations relate to the hero’s intent.
ACT THREE
This is simply the resolution of the problem. From the rubble laying around him/her, the protagonist picks up a piece of string and follows it to the eventual conclusion of the story. Some stories have downbeat endings, where the protagonist learns a lesson, but dies or is defeated.
Of course, there is no precise formula for success. It is always possible to alter this Three Act Structure, but remember, if you break these plot rules, you should at least know why you are doing it.
Here are some general guidelines for the objectives of Act Three.
1. Answer the central question of the book.
2. Fulfill all the promises made in Acts One and Two.
3. Answer all questions asked in Acts One and Two – no loose ends.
4. The protagonist must undergo a change to conquer a larger version of something that conquered him during Act 1.
For more information on writing and selling fiction, please visit www.new-online-bookstore.com and go to New Authors, where we have a free, 8-segment tutorial on the craft of writing and a 5 segment series on internet marketing – both free.
Patrick Dent
New Online Bookstore
New Books by New Authors Expect a little more…And get it.
http://www.new-online-bookstore.com
mailto:info@new-online-bookstore.com
By Patrick Dent
Published: 3/3/2006
Columbus, New Mexico's soiled doves - By James Hurst
Columbus, New Mexico's soiled doves - By James Hurst
From the Ringo Kid's girlfriend Claire in Stagecoach, through Miss Kitty in television's Gunsmoke, to the waif-like Diane Lane in Lonesome Dove the prostitute has been among the more enduring images of the literary and cinematic West. She was called "soiled dove", "shady lady", "fallen woman,” "lost sister", "saloon belle", and a host of other appellations. She was quite simply the ubiquitous whore, and her portrait has been painted on many different canvases and in a generous and imaginative assortment of colors.
She was the fallen woman with a heart of gold, selfless to a fault and ready at a moment's notice to do good for those in need. She was the woman with a heart of ice, ready to deceive, cheat, steal and murder for her lover, her husband or her pimp (often one and the same). She was the innocent waif forced into a degraded life by circumstances beyond her control and ultimately rescued from her degradation by a passing cowboy, lawman, miner, or prospector who fell in love with her and selflessly ignored her past.
She was the successful madam who ran a string of whores in a magnificent Victorian mansion on the edge of town and catered to the community's well-to-do and "respectable" men. Or, conversely, she put her "girls" in a wagon and dragged them from mining camp to mining camp and often became wealthy in the bargain. She was, though not too often, a woman who found a vocation she liked and pursued it with gusto, enjoying both the hours and the remuneration. She was, in point of fact, what our mixture of fact and fantasy made of her. She was an almost perfect blend of myth, legend and history.
As the nineteenth century waned and the frontier passed, prostitution came under closer scrutiny from reform-minded individuals and institutions. In 1913 the American Federation for Sex Hygiene and the National Vigilance Association merged to form the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), a blend of reformers and regulationists (the noun "activism" entered the English language shortly thereafter, in 1915). The essential division within the new organization was between the abolitionists who demanded eradication of what they considered to be a great social evil and the sanitarians who wanted to regulate the health of prostitutes in order to curb the spread of venereal disease.
The arguments within ASHA over prostitution soon made their way into the discourse of the general public, and on the eve of World War I the United States Army was faced with the question of what to do about the presence of prostitutes near Army installations. Officers within the Army itself were divided over the issue. Some insisted that hard work and regular exercise would curb the sexual appetites of the soldiers; others believed that men needed access to women if high morale was to be achieved and maintained. In the pre-World War I military action along the Mexican border triggered by Francisco Villa's 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, General John "Black Jack" Pershing came down on the side of regulation.
In Columbus, Pershing decided to permit regulated prostitution near Camp Furlong as long as the Army and representatives of the town cooperated to control the business. Troop morale and curbing the spread of VD were paramount in Pershing's view, and by the end of July 1916 a district of several blocks had been established. The district was strictly segregated into white and black sections, and alcohol and firearms were forbidden. Existing whorehouses outside the district were closed, and owners were required to relocate within the district or get out of town. Prostitutes were to be inspected by civilian doctors, and those who were infected were forced to leave.
The mayor of Columbus, T.H. Dabney, (who was also a doctor) worked with a member of the Army Medical Corps to inspect the women once a week. The inspection fee of two dollars was split evenly between Dabney and the corpsman, providing a weekly income of about fifty dollars for each of the two men (a not insignificant sum in those days). The VD rate fell, but occasionally spiked when infected women freelanced in the local saloons before being discovered and expelled. Infected men coming from the countryside were another problem, and in time the base commander decided that infected men were to be treated the same as infected women: they were run out of town by the city marshal.
The women worked either in a house or in a "crib" next to or near a house. In a house each girl greeted her customer in a parlor or "sitting room", and had either her own room or a shared room in which to entertain her clients. A crib was simply a hut, a shack or a lean-to providing a bit of shelter and privacy. Furniture in the crib was kept to a minimum: a cot, a straw-filled mat or a bedroll was the basic necessity along with a chair and a table to hold a lamp or candle. From detailed Army records we have a rather clear and certainly interesting picture of the "soiled doves" of Columbus. There were fifty recorded prostitutes, thirty-seven white and thirteen black, working in eight houses and a number of assorted cribs. The girls almost always went under a "sporting name" ("Mickey Doyle", "Dixie Lee", "Lovie Brown", "Bobbie White", "Babe Mularkey"), but willingly gave army inspectors their real names and backgrounds. Some had been "in the trade" or "on the line" for years before coming to Columbus, and others asserted that Columbus was their first experience with prostitution.
The most entrepreneurial of the housekeepers was Myrtle Mitchell. Myrtle, who claimed she was no longer on the line, ran six cribs and a house she leased from Jessie Van Cleave. Jessie had recently arrived from Tucumcari, New Mexico where she had worked as a waitress at the Glenrock Cafe and invested her savings in the house. She was described in the army records as "a large woman 5 ft. 6 in; 178 lbs; 30 years old; fat mushy face; fair complexion [sic] light brown hair; married to a soldier but quit him about 4 years ago, has a boy by first husband who died." In addition to Myrtle and Jessie, the house was staffed by Katie Stone, AKA Katie Paterson and Jewell Woods, AKA Ruby Russell.
Nell Bowers, who claimed she was never a sporting woman before coming to Columbus from El Paso, ran a house with ten girls. The youngest, Anne Shelton, was twenty-two and had seven years "sporting". She came to Columbus with her soldier husband who had married her out of a house in Galveston and continued "sporting" while living with him. The oldest, Nellie McCamant AKA Bessie, was thirty-five, and "was on line formerly for about 4 years, but married and quit the business, though she did some hustling while she was married, with knowledge of husband." The others were in their twenties, and if the Army reports are correct they were experienced in the trade.
In what the Army called the "Negro District", Mamie Williams managed a house with twelve prostitutes who ranged in age from twenty-two to thirty-two. In contrast to the white prostitutes, the black women apparently used no sporting names (if the Army records are correct). Only one, Audrey Taussig, claimed to have had no time in the sporting trade prior to coming to Columbus. Audrey's husband was with Pershing's troops in Mexico, and she decided that the "sporting life" was the best way to earn a living while he was gone. Most of the girls came from Texas, and there was one each from Pocatello, Idaho, Cincinnati, Ohio and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Even when controlled as it was in Columbus, the presence of prostitution presented a number of problems, not the least of which was the widespread use of alcohol and other drugs. The Army's concern with prostitution was disease, which if not controlled could seriously hamper military efficiency. Liquor, on the other had, had the potential to create an environment unfavorable to good discipline. In the War Department's Annual Report, 1916, the Surgeon General stated that "Alcohol and military efficiency have nothing in common." With that thought in mind the Army first persuaded the Trustees of Columbus to limit the sale of alcohol to "near beer", and then persuaded the village authorities to endorse a policy of total prohibition.
Prohibition in turn gave rise to illicit distillation and smuggling, and the Army and civil authorities were hard-pressed to control the problem. The border was patrolled and vehicles and trains were searched, but alcohol and drugs (opium and cocaine for the most part) still found their way to the whorehouses and cribs. The prostitutes found that alcohol enlivened their often-dreary lives and drugs made having sex with any man off the street bearable. Despite all the efforts of the Army and civil authority, prostitution, alcohol, and drugs formed a triad that was for all practical purposes unbreakable.
Prostitution for troops stationed in Columbus and for those encamped in Mexico was, in Pershing's view, a necessary service in order to maintain an acceptable level of good morale. The great enemy of military discipline and morale is idleness among the troops, and it was the idleness of both garrison life along the border and encampment in Mexico that led men into alcohol and drug abuse. Prostitution as regulated in Columbus and in the encampments of the Punitive Expedition in Mexico provided no great challenge to the order and discipline so necessary to military units. Alcohol and drugs, however, continued to be a problem, as they both proved difficult to control.
With the return of the Punitive Expedition from Mexico in 1917 and the departure of National Guard troops as they were released from active duty, Columbus returned to a semblance of the normalcy it had enjoyed prior to Villa's raid. Today it attracts snowbirds in the winter and tourists throughout the year, and the days of the Soiled Doves are gone. All that remains are the records in Army archives, the reminiscences of antiquarians, and the narratives of historians.
From the Ringo Kid's girlfriend Claire in Stagecoach, through Miss Kitty in television's Gunsmoke, to the waif-like Diane Lane in Lonesome Dove the prostitute has been among the more enduring images of the literary and cinematic West. She was called "soiled dove", "shady lady", "fallen woman,” "lost sister", "saloon belle", and a host of other appellations. She was quite simply the ubiquitous whore, and her portrait has been painted on many different canvases and in a generous and imaginative assortment of colors.
She was the fallen woman with a heart of gold, selfless to a fault and ready at a moment's notice to do good for those in need. She was the woman with a heart of ice, ready to deceive, cheat, steal and murder for her lover, her husband or her pimp (often one and the same). She was the innocent waif forced into a degraded life by circumstances beyond her control and ultimately rescued from her degradation by a passing cowboy, lawman, miner, or prospector who fell in love with her and selflessly ignored her past.
She was the successful madam who ran a string of whores in a magnificent Victorian mansion on the edge of town and catered to the community's well-to-do and "respectable" men. Or, conversely, she put her "girls" in a wagon and dragged them from mining camp to mining camp and often became wealthy in the bargain. She was, though not too often, a woman who found a vocation she liked and pursued it with gusto, enjoying both the hours and the remuneration. She was, in point of fact, what our mixture of fact and fantasy made of her. She was an almost perfect blend of myth, legend and history.
As the nineteenth century waned and the frontier passed, prostitution came under closer scrutiny from reform-minded individuals and institutions. In 1913 the American Federation for Sex Hygiene and the National Vigilance Association merged to form the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), a blend of reformers and regulationists (the noun "activism" entered the English language shortly thereafter, in 1915). The essential division within the new organization was between the abolitionists who demanded eradication of what they considered to be a great social evil and the sanitarians who wanted to regulate the health of prostitutes in order to curb the spread of venereal disease.
The arguments within ASHA over prostitution soon made their way into the discourse of the general public, and on the eve of World War I the United States Army was faced with the question of what to do about the presence of prostitutes near Army installations. Officers within the Army itself were divided over the issue. Some insisted that hard work and regular exercise would curb the sexual appetites of the soldiers; others believed that men needed access to women if high morale was to be achieved and maintained. In the pre-World War I military action along the Mexican border triggered by Francisco Villa's 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, General John "Black Jack" Pershing came down on the side of regulation.
In Columbus, Pershing decided to permit regulated prostitution near Camp Furlong as long as the Army and representatives of the town cooperated to control the business. Troop morale and curbing the spread of VD were paramount in Pershing's view, and by the end of July 1916 a district of several blocks had been established. The district was strictly segregated into white and black sections, and alcohol and firearms were forbidden. Existing whorehouses outside the district were closed, and owners were required to relocate within the district or get out of town. Prostitutes were to be inspected by civilian doctors, and those who were infected were forced to leave.
The mayor of Columbus, T.H. Dabney, (who was also a doctor) worked with a member of the Army Medical Corps to inspect the women once a week. The inspection fee of two dollars was split evenly between Dabney and the corpsman, providing a weekly income of about fifty dollars for each of the two men (a not insignificant sum in those days). The VD rate fell, but occasionally spiked when infected women freelanced in the local saloons before being discovered and expelled. Infected men coming from the countryside were another problem, and in time the base commander decided that infected men were to be treated the same as infected women: they were run out of town by the city marshal.
The women worked either in a house or in a "crib" next to or near a house. In a house each girl greeted her customer in a parlor or "sitting room", and had either her own room or a shared room in which to entertain her clients. A crib was simply a hut, a shack or a lean-to providing a bit of shelter and privacy. Furniture in the crib was kept to a minimum: a cot, a straw-filled mat or a bedroll was the basic necessity along with a chair and a table to hold a lamp or candle. From detailed Army records we have a rather clear and certainly interesting picture of the "soiled doves" of Columbus. There were fifty recorded prostitutes, thirty-seven white and thirteen black, working in eight houses and a number of assorted cribs. The girls almost always went under a "sporting name" ("Mickey Doyle", "Dixie Lee", "Lovie Brown", "Bobbie White", "Babe Mularkey"), but willingly gave army inspectors their real names and backgrounds. Some had been "in the trade" or "on the line" for years before coming to Columbus, and others asserted that Columbus was their first experience with prostitution.
The most entrepreneurial of the housekeepers was Myrtle Mitchell. Myrtle, who claimed she was no longer on the line, ran six cribs and a house she leased from Jessie Van Cleave. Jessie had recently arrived from Tucumcari, New Mexico where she had worked as a waitress at the Glenrock Cafe and invested her savings in the house. She was described in the army records as "a large woman 5 ft. 6 in; 178 lbs; 30 years old; fat mushy face; fair complexion [sic] light brown hair; married to a soldier but quit him about 4 years ago, has a boy by first husband who died." In addition to Myrtle and Jessie, the house was staffed by Katie Stone, AKA Katie Paterson and Jewell Woods, AKA Ruby Russell.
Nell Bowers, who claimed she was never a sporting woman before coming to Columbus from El Paso, ran a house with ten girls. The youngest, Anne Shelton, was twenty-two and had seven years "sporting". She came to Columbus with her soldier husband who had married her out of a house in Galveston and continued "sporting" while living with him. The oldest, Nellie McCamant AKA Bessie, was thirty-five, and "was on line formerly for about 4 years, but married and quit the business, though she did some hustling while she was married, with knowledge of husband." The others were in their twenties, and if the Army reports are correct they were experienced in the trade.
In what the Army called the "Negro District", Mamie Williams managed a house with twelve prostitutes who ranged in age from twenty-two to thirty-two. In contrast to the white prostitutes, the black women apparently used no sporting names (if the Army records are correct). Only one, Audrey Taussig, claimed to have had no time in the sporting trade prior to coming to Columbus. Audrey's husband was with Pershing's troops in Mexico, and she decided that the "sporting life" was the best way to earn a living while he was gone. Most of the girls came from Texas, and there was one each from Pocatello, Idaho, Cincinnati, Ohio and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Even when controlled as it was in Columbus, the presence of prostitution presented a number of problems, not the least of which was the widespread use of alcohol and other drugs. The Army's concern with prostitution was disease, which if not controlled could seriously hamper military efficiency. Liquor, on the other had, had the potential to create an environment unfavorable to good discipline. In the War Department's Annual Report, 1916, the Surgeon General stated that "Alcohol and military efficiency have nothing in common." With that thought in mind the Army first persuaded the Trustees of Columbus to limit the sale of alcohol to "near beer", and then persuaded the village authorities to endorse a policy of total prohibition.
Prohibition in turn gave rise to illicit distillation and smuggling, and the Army and civil authorities were hard-pressed to control the problem. The border was patrolled and vehicles and trains were searched, but alcohol and drugs (opium and cocaine for the most part) still found their way to the whorehouses and cribs. The prostitutes found that alcohol enlivened their often-dreary lives and drugs made having sex with any man off the street bearable. Despite all the efforts of the Army and civil authority, prostitution, alcohol, and drugs formed a triad that was for all practical purposes unbreakable.
Prostitution for troops stationed in Columbus and for those encamped in Mexico was, in Pershing's view, a necessary service in order to maintain an acceptable level of good morale. The great enemy of military discipline and morale is idleness among the troops, and it was the idleness of both garrison life along the border and encampment in Mexico that led men into alcohol and drug abuse. Prostitution as regulated in Columbus and in the encampments of the Punitive Expedition in Mexico provided no great challenge to the order and discipline so necessary to military units. Alcohol and drugs, however, continued to be a problem, as they both proved difficult to control.
With the return of the Punitive Expedition from Mexico in 1917 and the departure of National Guard troops as they were released from active duty, Columbus returned to a semblance of the normalcy it had enjoyed prior to Villa's raid. Today it attracts snowbirds in the winter and tourists throughout the year, and the days of the Soiled Doves are gone. All that remains are the records in Army archives, the reminiscences of antiquarians, and the narratives of historians.
Supply and Demand
The Old West Soiled Dove's environment was interesting, especially the business aspects of prostitution.
Work for yourself and you are an independent contractor. Work for a pimp or a Madame...and let them be your Business Manager.
If the soiled doves learned a skill, they could bump up their prices.
One s.d. did not want to lease a place of business, so she provided remote services in the open, thus reducing overhead costs.
Although an unorthodox business, these women knew the fundamentals of economics -- supply and demand.
Many Madams paid off officials to keep their business in operation.
These women were survivors in an era when the rights of women were limited, at best, denied, more commonly.
Work for yourself and you are an independent contractor. Work for a pimp or a Madame...and let them be your Business Manager.
If the soiled doves learned a skill, they could bump up their prices.
One s.d. did not want to lease a place of business, so she provided remote services in the open, thus reducing overhead costs.
Although an unorthodox business, these women knew the fundamentals of economics -- supply and demand.
Many Madams paid off officials to keep their business in operation.
These women were survivors in an era when the rights of women were limited, at best, denied, more commonly.
Prison Survival Guide
Yikes.
Always be respectful and polite to other prisoners, regardless of how weird they may act or dress. First, because you don't know who or what they are, and second, because respect and personal dignity are the most valued possessions left to a prisoner.
Never tell another prisoner what to do or give anyone orders. Don't tell the noisy ones in the law library to be quiet. Prisoners deeply resent being bossed around by another prisoner. Their likely response -- even to a polite request -- is, "What are you, a f---in' cop?"
Never stare at another prisoner for more than a second or two. He may be a walking powder keg, set off by an intrusive stare. He may either assault you on the spot or wait until darkness. Even if he doesn't kill you outright, your face will never look the same again.
Avoid anyone offering to “take you under their wing” or help you out. Generally, they are booty bandits, or Jailhouse pimps running a well thought out and practiced game against you.
TIMELINE (Yet another one!)
1850s
1841 - Volney B. Palmer opens the first American advertising agency, in Philadelphia.
1850 - Advertising in the New York Tribune doubles between October 1849 and October 1850.
1850 - Phineas T. Barnum brings Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale" to America, employing newspaper ads, handbills, and broadsides to drum up extraordinary interest in this, until now, unknown-to-Americans international singing star. From being relatively anonymous six months prior to her arrival, she is met at the docks by 30,000 New Yorkers - a result of Barnum's advertising campaign.
1851 - I. M. Singer and Company takes out its first patent for the Singer Perpendicular Action Sewing Machine.
1851 - The first issue of the New York Times (under the name "New-York Daily Times") is published.
1851 -Benjamin Bratt is the first to manufacture and mass-market soap in bar form.
1852 - First advertisement for Smith Brother's Cough Candy (drops) appears in a Poughkeepsie, New York paper - the two brothers in the illustration are named "Trade" and "Mark."
1853 - A Boston court rules that Singer infringed on Elias B. Howe's 1846 sewing machine patent, and Singer pays Howe $15,000 in the settlement.
1853 - Railroad lines reach west as far as the Mississippi River.
1856 - Mathew Brady advertises his services of "photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes" in the New York Herald paper. His inventive use of type in the ad goes against the newspaper industry standard of all-agate and all same-size type used for advertisements in the papers.
1856 - Robert Bonner is the first to run a full-page ad in a paper, advertising his own literary paper, the New York Ledger.
1858 - First Transatlantic cable laid, between Ireland and Newfoundland.
1860s
1860 - 33,000 patents are issued between 1850 - 1860; only 6,000 patents had been issued in the previous decade.
1861 - The first Sunday edition of the re-named New-York Times is published, capitalizing on interest in news of the Civil War.
1861 - There are twenty advertising agencies in New York City.
1863 - James W. Tufts builds and patents a soda-fountain machine for use in his Boston drugstore.
1864 - William James Carlton begins selling advertising space in newspapers, founding the agency that later became the J. Walter Thompson Company, the oldest American advertising agency in continuous existence.
1865 - George P. Rowell and his friend Horace Dodd open their advertising agency in Boston.
1866 - Transatlantic cable becomes operational.
1867 - The magazine Harper's Bazaar premieres.
1867 - Lord & Taylor is the first company to use double-column advertising in newspapers.
1868 - Vanity Fair magazine begins.
1869 - N. W. Ayer and Sons advertising agency is founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the following year begins advertising its own agency in both general and trade publications.
1869 - E. C. Allan starts the People's Literary Companion, marking the beginning of the "mail-order" periodical.
1869 - The first advertisement for Sapolio soap is published.
1869 - George P. Rowell issues the first Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, providing advertisers with information on the estimated circulation of papers and thus helping to standardize value for space in advertising.
1860s - Advertising begins to appear in nationally distributed monthly magazines.
1870s
1870 - Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe) appears in a Harper's Weekly advertisement endorsing Waltham watches.
1870 - The Boardwalk in Atlantic City is completed.
1870 - Chesebrough Manufacturing Co., makers of Vaseline, is founded.
1870 - 5,091 newspapers are in circulation, compared to 715 in 1830.
1871 - 121 brand names and trademarks are registered with the US Patent Office.
1872 - Montgomery Ward begins mail order business with the issue of its first catalog.
1872 - The Associated Press extends its news service to 200 papers.
1875 - 1,138 brand names and trademarks are registered with the US Patent Office.
1875 - The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, made by the Remington Co., is first advertised in New York papers; the first successfully selling typewriter, the "Remington No. 2," appears in 1878.
1876 - Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.
1877 - The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 occurs. The labor unrest spreads across the country, affecting freight traffic.
1877 - The Washington Post newspaper begins publication with a circulation of 10,000, costing 3 cents a paper.
1878 - Thomas Edison secures basic patent for a phonograph machine.
1878 - J. Walter Thompson buys out William J. Carlton's small ad agency and renames it after himself.
1878 - The American Cereal Co. introduces Quaker Oats as the first mass-marketed breakfast food.
1879 - Ivory soap is named, four years after the formula was accidentally discovered at Procter & Gamble.
1879 - George Eastman patents a process for making dry photographic plates.
1879 - Frank Woolworth opens his first "five and dime" store.
1879 - John Wanamaker places the first whole-page newspaper advertisement by an American department store.
1870s - Charles E. Hires begins advertising Hires Root Beer in the Philadelphia Ledger, expanding over the next two decades into national magazines.
1870s - $1 million dollars is spent annually advertising Lydia Pinkham's Pink Pills.
1870s - Louis Prang, a lithographer and printer, develops the idea of mass-producing small "trade cards" that could be adapted to the needs of individual advertisers at low cost. Thread companies, such as Clark's O.N.T., are among the first to begin nationwide distribution of advertising trade cards.
1870s - In response to the high volume of outdoor advertising (including posters and signs painted on rocks, buildings and barns) in cities and rural areas, several states begin to impose limitations to protect natural scenery from sign painters.
1880s
1880 - Singer Sewing Machines and McCormick Reapers begin to dominate their respective markets.
1880 - John Wanamaker hires John E. Powers, who brings a fresh style to advertising - an honest, direct and fresh appeal emphasizing the style, elegance, comfort and luxury of products. Powers is later called "the father of honest advertising."
1881 - James Bonsack develops an efficient cigarette-rolling machine; until this point cigarettes (like cigars) have been rolled by hand.
1883 - James B. Duke leases the Bonsack rolling machines. This contract ensures that his cost to manufacture cigarettes will be 25% below his competitors.
1883 - Ladies Home Journal and Life Magazine begin publication.
1884 - Linotype machine invented, advancing the use of color in printing.
1885 - The Washington Monument is dedicated.
1885 - New postal regulations reduce the cost of second class mailing to one cent per pound, allowing an almost immediate increase in the number of new subscription-based periodicals.
1886 - Coca-Cola is invented in Atlanta, Georgia by Dr. John S. Pemberton. Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, penned the name Coca-Cola in the flowing script that is still used in advertising today.
1886 - Cosmopolitan magazine begins.
1886 - Sears, Roebuck & Company begins mail-order business.
1887 - Introduction of the "safety bicycle," which had wheels of equal size.
1887 - Congress enacts the Interstate Commerce Act.
1888 - Printer's Ink, the oldest, most prestigious and largest magazine targeted to advertisers, agencies and copywriters is founded by George P. Rowell.
1888 - Eastman begins advertising the first hand-held Kodak camera.
1888 - Congress establishes the Department of Labor.
1889 - James B. Duke spends 20 per cent of the gross sale of his tobacco company earnings ($80,000) towards advertising.
1889 - Munsey's magazine is started.
1880s - Illustrated trade cards reach the height of their popularity, not only with advertisers but also with the American public, which becomes remarkably interested in collecting them.
1890s
1890 - The American Tobacco Company is founded, absorbing over 200 hundred rival firms, and gains control of the cigarette and smoking tobacco industries.
1890 - Literary Digest begins publication.
1890 - J. Walter Thompson Company's billings total over one million dollars.
1890 - The Sherman Anti-Trust Act becomes the first legislation enacted by the United States Congress to curb concentrations of power that interfere with trade and reduce economic competition. It is named for U.S. senator John Sherman, an expert on the regulation of commerce.
1891 - The precursor organization to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) is created under the name Associated Bill Posters Association of United States and Canada. OAAA is not used as the organizational name until 1925.
1891 - Batten and Co. advertising agency is founded by George Batten in New York, merging with another agency in 1928 to form Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne (BBDO).
1891 - Nathan Fowler, in Advertising Age, recommends that because women make most of the purchasing decisions of their household, manufacturers would do well to direct their advertising messages to them.
1892 - Artemus Ward, advertising for Sapolio Soap, sponsors a Captain Andrews' trans-Atlantic voyage in a 14 foot boat to celebrate Columbus' voyage 400 years earlier. The voyage takes 3 months to complete and is widely followed and reported on in the press, providing free advertising for Sapolio soap.
1892 - Vogue magazine begins publication.
1892 -Sears, Roebuck & Co. mails out 8,000 post cards with imitation handwriting across the country. 2,000 orders are received directly from this promotional campaign.
1892 - The Ladies Home Journal announces it will no longer accept patent medicine advertising.
1893 - McClure's Magazine begins publication.
1893 - The Royal Baking Powder Co. is estimated be the biggest newspaper advertiser in the world.
1894 - The R. C. Maxwell Company, the oldest existing outdoor advertising company in America, is created. The company concentrates primarily in the Middle Atlantic states.
1895 - Fred Pabst, president of Pabst Brewing Company, predicts in an essay that beer will become the national beverage of the United States.
1895 - The first US patent for a gasoline powered automobile is given to Charles Duryea.
1895 - The first American automobile race is run from Chicago to Evanston, Illinois and back. Two out of six cars finish the 54 mile long race, with a winning time of 7 hours, 53 minutes. The winner, Charles E. Duryea, that same year places what may be the first automobile advertisement ever, in The Horseless Carriage
1896 - The Monarch Bicycle Company spends $125,000 on advertising, including $10,000 for a bicycle racing crew that tours the country participating in bicycle races under the Monarch name. The company sells 50,000 bicycles in 1896, up from 1,200 sold in 1893.
1896 - J. Walter Thompson Company begins using the Rock of Gibraltar in its advertising for Prudential Insurance Co.
1896 - Full color lithographic advertising prints for Ivory Soap are sent directly from specialty printers to magazine publishers, who bind them into magazines. This practice is soon taken up by other manufacturers.
1896 - The Duryea Motor Wagon opens Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth at Madison Square Garden in New York.
1898 - The Pepsi-Cola formula is created by Caleb Bradham, a New Bern, NC druggist.
1898 - N. W. Ayer & Sons begin using outdoor advertising.
1898 - The National Biscuit Company is founded, and immediately begins advertising its Uneeda Biscuit, employing the N. W. Ayer & Sons advertising agency for a campaign that became very successful.
1899 - J. Walter Thompson Company opens a London office, possibly the first international office of an American advertising agency.
1899 - Eighty companies are making, or preparing to make, automobiles.
1890s - Advertisements for alcohol - wines, liqueurs, and whiskeys - are placed in popular national magazines, such as Harper's Weekly.
1890s - Women are depicted outside the home in a non-domestic setting for the first time in bicycle ads.
1890s - Advertising manuals increasingly recommend the use of post cards as a low cost means of direct communication with consumers.
1841 - Volney B. Palmer opens the first American advertising agency, in Philadelphia.
1850 - Advertising in the New York Tribune doubles between October 1849 and October 1850.
1850 - Phineas T. Barnum brings Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale" to America, employing newspaper ads, handbills, and broadsides to drum up extraordinary interest in this, until now, unknown-to-Americans international singing star. From being relatively anonymous six months prior to her arrival, she is met at the docks by 30,000 New Yorkers - a result of Barnum's advertising campaign.
1851 - I. M. Singer and Company takes out its first patent for the Singer Perpendicular Action Sewing Machine.
1851 - The first issue of the New York Times (under the name "New-York Daily Times") is published.
1851 -Benjamin Bratt is the first to manufacture and mass-market soap in bar form.
1852 - First advertisement for Smith Brother's Cough Candy (drops) appears in a Poughkeepsie, New York paper - the two brothers in the illustration are named "Trade" and "Mark."
1853 - A Boston court rules that Singer infringed on Elias B. Howe's 1846 sewing machine patent, and Singer pays Howe $15,000 in the settlement.
1853 - Railroad lines reach west as far as the Mississippi River.
1856 - Mathew Brady advertises his services of "photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes" in the New York Herald paper. His inventive use of type in the ad goes against the newspaper industry standard of all-agate and all same-size type used for advertisements in the papers.
1856 - Robert Bonner is the first to run a full-page ad in a paper, advertising his own literary paper, the New York Ledger.
1858 - First Transatlantic cable laid, between Ireland and Newfoundland.
1860s
1860 - 33,000 patents are issued between 1850 - 1860; only 6,000 patents had been issued in the previous decade.
1861 - The first Sunday edition of the re-named New-York Times is published, capitalizing on interest in news of the Civil War.
1861 - There are twenty advertising agencies in New York City.
1863 - James W. Tufts builds and patents a soda-fountain machine for use in his Boston drugstore.
1864 - William James Carlton begins selling advertising space in newspapers, founding the agency that later became the J. Walter Thompson Company, the oldest American advertising agency in continuous existence.
1865 - George P. Rowell and his friend Horace Dodd open their advertising agency in Boston.
1866 - Transatlantic cable becomes operational.
1867 - The magazine Harper's Bazaar premieres.
1867 - Lord & Taylor is the first company to use double-column advertising in newspapers.
1868 - Vanity Fair magazine begins.
1869 - N. W. Ayer and Sons advertising agency is founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the following year begins advertising its own agency in both general and trade publications.
1869 - E. C. Allan starts the People's Literary Companion, marking the beginning of the "mail-order" periodical.
1869 - The first advertisement for Sapolio soap is published.
1869 - George P. Rowell issues the first Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, providing advertisers with information on the estimated circulation of papers and thus helping to standardize value for space in advertising.
1860s - Advertising begins to appear in nationally distributed monthly magazines.
1870s
1870 - Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe) appears in a Harper's Weekly advertisement endorsing Waltham watches.
1870 - The Boardwalk in Atlantic City is completed.
1870 - Chesebrough Manufacturing Co., makers of Vaseline, is founded.
1870 - 5,091 newspapers are in circulation, compared to 715 in 1830.
1871 - 121 brand names and trademarks are registered with the US Patent Office.
1872 - Montgomery Ward begins mail order business with the issue of its first catalog.
1872 - The Associated Press extends its news service to 200 papers.
1875 - 1,138 brand names and trademarks are registered with the US Patent Office.
1875 - The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, made by the Remington Co., is first advertised in New York papers; the first successfully selling typewriter, the "Remington No. 2," appears in 1878.
1876 - Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.
1877 - The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 occurs. The labor unrest spreads across the country, affecting freight traffic.
1877 - The Washington Post newspaper begins publication with a circulation of 10,000, costing 3 cents a paper.
1878 - Thomas Edison secures basic patent for a phonograph machine.
1878 - J. Walter Thompson buys out William J. Carlton's small ad agency and renames it after himself.
1878 - The American Cereal Co. introduces Quaker Oats as the first mass-marketed breakfast food.
1879 - Ivory soap is named, four years after the formula was accidentally discovered at Procter & Gamble.
1879 - George Eastman patents a process for making dry photographic plates.
1879 - Frank Woolworth opens his first "five and dime" store.
1879 - John Wanamaker places the first whole-page newspaper advertisement by an American department store.
1870s - Charles E. Hires begins advertising Hires Root Beer in the Philadelphia Ledger, expanding over the next two decades into national magazines.
1870s - $1 million dollars is spent annually advertising Lydia Pinkham's Pink Pills.
1870s - Louis Prang, a lithographer and printer, develops the idea of mass-producing small "trade cards" that could be adapted to the needs of individual advertisers at low cost. Thread companies, such as Clark's O.N.T., are among the first to begin nationwide distribution of advertising trade cards.
1870s - In response to the high volume of outdoor advertising (including posters and signs painted on rocks, buildings and barns) in cities and rural areas, several states begin to impose limitations to protect natural scenery from sign painters.
1880s
1880 - Singer Sewing Machines and McCormick Reapers begin to dominate their respective markets.
1880 - John Wanamaker hires John E. Powers, who brings a fresh style to advertising - an honest, direct and fresh appeal emphasizing the style, elegance, comfort and luxury of products. Powers is later called "the father of honest advertising."
1881 - James Bonsack develops an efficient cigarette-rolling machine; until this point cigarettes (like cigars) have been rolled by hand.
1883 - James B. Duke leases the Bonsack rolling machines. This contract ensures that his cost to manufacture cigarettes will be 25% below his competitors.
1883 - Ladies Home Journal and Life Magazine begin publication.
1884 - Linotype machine invented, advancing the use of color in printing.
1885 - The Washington Monument is dedicated.
1885 - New postal regulations reduce the cost of second class mailing to one cent per pound, allowing an almost immediate increase in the number of new subscription-based periodicals.
1886 - Coca-Cola is invented in Atlanta, Georgia by Dr. John S. Pemberton. Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, penned the name Coca-Cola in the flowing script that is still used in advertising today.
1886 - Cosmopolitan magazine begins.
1886 - Sears, Roebuck & Company begins mail-order business.
1887 - Introduction of the "safety bicycle," which had wheels of equal size.
1887 - Congress enacts the Interstate Commerce Act.
1888 - Printer's Ink, the oldest, most prestigious and largest magazine targeted to advertisers, agencies and copywriters is founded by George P. Rowell.
1888 - Eastman begins advertising the first hand-held Kodak camera.
1888 - Congress establishes the Department of Labor.
1889 - James B. Duke spends 20 per cent of the gross sale of his tobacco company earnings ($80,000) towards advertising.
1889 - Munsey's magazine is started.
1880s - Illustrated trade cards reach the height of their popularity, not only with advertisers but also with the American public, which becomes remarkably interested in collecting them.
1890s
1890 - The American Tobacco Company is founded, absorbing over 200 hundred rival firms, and gains control of the cigarette and smoking tobacco industries.
1890 - Literary Digest begins publication.
1890 - J. Walter Thompson Company's billings total over one million dollars.
1890 - The Sherman Anti-Trust Act becomes the first legislation enacted by the United States Congress to curb concentrations of power that interfere with trade and reduce economic competition. It is named for U.S. senator John Sherman, an expert on the regulation of commerce.
1891 - The precursor organization to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) is created under the name Associated Bill Posters Association of United States and Canada. OAAA is not used as the organizational name until 1925.
1891 - Batten and Co. advertising agency is founded by George Batten in New York, merging with another agency in 1928 to form Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne (BBDO).
1891 - Nathan Fowler, in Advertising Age, recommends that because women make most of the purchasing decisions of their household, manufacturers would do well to direct their advertising messages to them.
1892 - Artemus Ward, advertising for Sapolio Soap, sponsors a Captain Andrews' trans-Atlantic voyage in a 14 foot boat to celebrate Columbus' voyage 400 years earlier. The voyage takes 3 months to complete and is widely followed and reported on in the press, providing free advertising for Sapolio soap.
1892 - Vogue magazine begins publication.
1892 -Sears, Roebuck & Co. mails out 8,000 post cards with imitation handwriting across the country. 2,000 orders are received directly from this promotional campaign.
1892 - The Ladies Home Journal announces it will no longer accept patent medicine advertising.
1893 - McClure's Magazine begins publication.
1893 - The Royal Baking Powder Co. is estimated be the biggest newspaper advertiser in the world.
1894 - The R. C. Maxwell Company, the oldest existing outdoor advertising company in America, is created. The company concentrates primarily in the Middle Atlantic states.
1895 - Fred Pabst, president of Pabst Brewing Company, predicts in an essay that beer will become the national beverage of the United States.
1895 - The first US patent for a gasoline powered automobile is given to Charles Duryea.
1895 - The first American automobile race is run from Chicago to Evanston, Illinois and back. Two out of six cars finish the 54 mile long race, with a winning time of 7 hours, 53 minutes. The winner, Charles E. Duryea, that same year places what may be the first automobile advertisement ever, in The Horseless Carriage
1896 - The Monarch Bicycle Company spends $125,000 on advertising, including $10,000 for a bicycle racing crew that tours the country participating in bicycle races under the Monarch name. The company sells 50,000 bicycles in 1896, up from 1,200 sold in 1893.
1896 - J. Walter Thompson Company begins using the Rock of Gibraltar in its advertising for Prudential Insurance Co.
1896 - Full color lithographic advertising prints for Ivory Soap are sent directly from specialty printers to magazine publishers, who bind them into magazines. This practice is soon taken up by other manufacturers.
1896 - The Duryea Motor Wagon opens Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth at Madison Square Garden in New York.
1898 - The Pepsi-Cola formula is created by Caleb Bradham, a New Bern, NC druggist.
1898 - N. W. Ayer & Sons begin using outdoor advertising.
1898 - The National Biscuit Company is founded, and immediately begins advertising its Uneeda Biscuit, employing the N. W. Ayer & Sons advertising agency for a campaign that became very successful.
1899 - J. Walter Thompson Company opens a London office, possibly the first international office of an American advertising agency.
1899 - Eighty companies are making, or preparing to make, automobiles.
1890s - Advertisements for alcohol - wines, liqueurs, and whiskeys - are placed in popular national magazines, such as Harper's Weekly.
1890s - Women are depicted outside the home in a non-domestic setting for the first time in bicycle ads.
1890s - Advertising manuals increasingly recommend the use of post cards as a low cost means of direct communication with consumers.
TIMELINE (Yet another one!)
1850s
1841 - Volney B. Palmer opens the first American advertising agency, in Philadelphia.
1850 - Advertising in the New York Tribune doubles between October 1849 and October 1850.
1850 - Phineas T. Barnum brings Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale" to America, employing newspaper ads, handbills, and broadsides to drum up extraordinary interest in this, until now, unknown-to-Americans international singing star. From being relatively anonymous six months prior to her arrival, she is met at the docks by 30,000 New Yorkers - a result of Barnum's advertising campaign.
1851 - I. M. Singer and Company takes out its first patent for the Singer Perpendicular Action Sewing Machine.
1851 - The first issue of the New York Times (under the name "New-York Daily Times") is published.
1851 -Benjamin Bratt is the first to manufacture and mass-market soap in bar form.
1852 - First advertisement for Smith Brother's Cough Candy (drops) appears in a Poughkeepsie, New York paper - the two brothers in the illustration are named "Trade" and "Mark."
1853 - A Boston court rules that Singer infringed on Elias B. Howe's 1846 sewing machine patent, and Singer pays Howe $15,000 in the settlement.
1853 - Railroad lines reach west as far as the Mississippi River.
1856 - Mathew Brady advertises his services of "photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes" in the New York Herald paper. His inventive use of type in the ad goes against the newspaper industry standard of all-agate and all same-size type used for advertisements in the papers.
1856 - Robert Bonner is the first to run a full-page ad in a paper, advertising his own literary paper, the New York Ledger.
1858 - First Transatlantic cable laid, between Ireland and Newfoundland.
1860s
1860 - 33,000 patents are issued between 1850 - 1860; only 6,000 patents had been issued in the previous decade.
1861 - The first Sunday edition of the re-named New-York Times is published, capitalizing on interest in news of the Civil War.
1861 - There are twenty advertising agencies in New York City.
1863 - James W. Tufts builds and patents a soda-fountain machine for use in his Boston drugstore.
1864 - William James Carlton begins selling advertising space in newspapers, founding the agency that later became the J. Walter Thompson Company, the oldest American advertising agency in continuous existence.
1865 - George P. Rowell and his friend Horace Dodd open their advertising agency in Boston.
1866 - Transatlantic cable becomes operational.
1867 - The magazine Harper's Bazaar premieres.
1867 - Lord & Taylor is the first company to use double-column advertising in newspapers.
1868 - Vanity Fair magazine begins.
1869 - N. W. Ayer and Sons advertising agency is founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the following year begins advertising its own agency in both general and trade publications.
1869 - E. C. Allan starts the People's Literary Companion, marking the beginning of the "mail-order" periodical.
1869 - The first advertisement for Sapolio soap is published.
1869 - George P. Rowell issues the first Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, providing advertisers with information on the estimated circulation of papers and thus helping to standardize value for space in advertising.
1860s - Advertising begins to appear in nationally distributed monthly magazines.
1870s
1870 - Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe) appears in a Harper's Weekly advertisement endorsing Waltham watches.
1870 - The Boardwalk in Atlantic City is completed.
1870 - Chesebrough Manufacturing Co., makers of Vaseline, is founded.
1870 - 5,091 newspapers are in circulation, compared to 715 in 1830.
1871 - 121 brand names and trademarks are registered with the US Patent Office.
1872 - Montgomery Ward begins mail order business with the issue of its first catalog.
1872 - The Associated Press extends its news service to 200 papers.
1875 - 1,138 brand names and trademarks are registered with the US Patent Office.
1875 - The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, made by the Remington Co., is first advertised in New York papers; the first successfully selling typewriter, the "Remington No. 2," appears in 1878.
1876 - Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.
1877 - The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 occurs. The labor unrest spreads across the country, affecting freight traffic.
1877 - The Washington Post newspaper begins publication with a circulation of 10,000, costing 3 cents a paper.
1878 - Thomas Edison secures basic patent for a phonograph machine.
1878 - J. Walter Thompson buys out William J. Carlton's small ad agency and renames it after himself.
1878 - The American Cereal Co. introduces Quaker Oats as the first mass-marketed breakfast food.
1879 - Ivory soap is named, four years after the formula was accidentally discovered at Procter & Gamble.
1879 - George Eastman patents a process for making dry photographic plates.
1879 - Frank Woolworth opens his first "five and dime" store.
1879 - John Wanamaker places the first whole-page newspaper advertisement by an American department store.
1870s - Charles E. Hires begins advertising Hires Root Beer in the Philadelphia Ledger, expanding over the next two decades into national magazines.
1870s - $1 million dollars is spent annually advertising Lydia Pinkham's Pink Pills.
1870s - Louis Prang, a lithographer and printer, develops the idea of mass-producing small "trade cards" that could be adapted to the needs of individual advertisers at low cost. Thread companies, such as Clark's O.N.T., are among the first to begin nationwide distribution of advertising trade cards.
1870s - In response to the high volume of outdoor advertising (including posters and signs painted on rocks, buildings and barns) in cities and rural areas, several states begin to impose limitations to protect natural scenery from sign painters.
1880s
1880 - Singer Sewing Machines and McCormick Reapers begin to dominate their respective markets.
1880 - John Wanamaker hires John E. Powers, who brings a fresh style to advertising - an honest, direct and fresh appeal emphasizing the style, elegance, comfort and luxury of products. Powers is later called "the father of honest advertising."
1881 - James Bonsack develops an efficient cigarette-rolling machine; until this point cigarettes (like cigars) have been rolled by hand.
1883 - James B. Duke leases the Bonsack rolling machines. This contract ensures that his cost to manufacture cigarettes will be 25% below his competitors.
1883 - Ladies Home Journal and Life Magazine begin publication.
1884 - Linotype machine invented, advancing the use of color in printing.
1885 - The Washington Monument is dedicated.
1885 - New postal regulations reduce the cost of second class mailing to one cent per pound, allowing an almost immediate increase in the number of new subscription-based periodicals.
1886 - Coca-Cola is invented in Atlanta, Georgia by Dr. John S. Pemberton. Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, penned the name Coca-Cola in the flowing script that is still used in advertising today.
1886 - Cosmopolitan magazine begins.
1886 - Sears, Roebuck & Company begins mail-order business.
1887 - Introduction of the "safety bicycle," which had wheels of equal size.
1887 - Congress enacts the Interstate Commerce Act.
1888 - Printer's Ink, the oldest, most prestigious and largest magazine targeted to advertisers, agencies and copywriters is founded by George P. Rowell.
1888 - Eastman begins advertising the first hand-held Kodak camera.
1888 - Congress establishes the Department of Labor.
1889 - James B. Duke spends 20 per cent of the gross sale of his tobacco company earnings ($80,000) towards advertising.
1889 - Munsey's magazine is started.
1880s - Illustrated trade cards reach the height of their popularity, not only with advertisers but also with the American public, which becomes remarkably interested in collecting them.
1890s
1890 - The American Tobacco Company is founded, absorbing over 200 hundred rival firms, and gains control of the cigarette and smoking tobacco industries.
1890 - Literary Digest begins publication.
1890 - J. Walter Thompson Company's billings total over one million dollars.
1890 - The Sherman Anti-Trust Act becomes the first legislation enacted by the United States Congress to curb concentrations of power that interfere with trade and reduce economic competition. It is named for U.S. senator John Sherman, an expert on the regulation of commerce.
1891 - The precursor organization to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) is created under the name Associated Bill Posters Association of United States and Canada. OAAA is not used as the organizational name until 1925.
1891 - Batten and Co. advertising agency is founded by George Batten in New York, merging with another agency in 1928 to form Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne (BBDO).
1891 - Nathan Fowler, in Advertising Age, recommends that because women make most of the purchasing decisions of their household, manufacturers would do well to direct their advertising messages to them.
1892 - Artemus Ward, advertising for Sapolio Soap, sponsors a Captain Andrews' trans-Atlantic voyage in a 14 foot boat to celebrate Columbus' voyage 400 years earlier. The voyage takes 3 months to complete and is widely followed and reported on in the press, providing free advertising for Sapolio soap.
1892 - Vogue magazine begins publication.
1892 -Sears, Roebuck & Co. mails out 8,000 post cards with imitation handwriting across the country. 2,000 orders are received directly from this promotional campaign.
1892 - The Ladies Home Journal announces it will no longer accept patent medicine advertising.
1893 - McClure's Magazine begins publication.
1893 - The Royal Baking Powder Co. is estimated be the biggest newspaper advertiser in the world.
1894 - The R. C. Maxwell Company, the oldest existing outdoor advertising company in America, is created. The company concentrates primarily in the Middle Atlantic states.
1895 - Fred Pabst, president of Pabst Brewing Company, predicts in an essay that beer will become the national beverage of the United States.
1895 - The first US patent for a gasoline powered automobile is given to Charles Duryea.
1895 - The first American automobile race is run from Chicago to Evanston, Illinois and back. Two out of six cars finish the 54 mile long race, with a winning time of 7 hours, 53 minutes. The winner, Charles E. Duryea, that same year places what may be the first automobile advertisement ever, in The Horseless Carriage
1896 - The Monarch Bicycle Company spends $125,000 on advertising, including $10,000 for a bicycle racing crew that tours the country participating in bicycle races under the Monarch name. The company sells 50,000 bicycles in 1896, up from 1,200 sold in 1893.
1896 - J. Walter Thompson Company begins using the Rock of Gibraltar in its advertising for Prudential Insurance Co.
1896 - Full color lithographic advertising prints for Ivory Soap are sent directly from specialty printers to magazine publishers, who bind them into magazines. This practice is soon taken up by other manufacturers.
1896 - The Duryea Motor Wagon opens Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth at Madison Square Garden in New York.
1898 - The Pepsi-Cola formula is created by Caleb Bradham, a New Bern, NC druggist.
1898 - N. W. Ayer & Sons begin using outdoor advertising.
1898 - The National Biscuit Company is founded, and immediately begins advertising its Uneeda Biscuit, employing the N. W. Ayer & Sons advertising agency for a campaign that became very successful.
1899 - J. Walter Thompson Company opens a London office, possibly the first international office of an American advertising agency.
1899 - Eighty companies are making, or preparing to make, automobiles.
1890s - Advertisements for alcohol - wines, liqueurs, and whiskeys - are placed in popular national magazines, such as Harper's Weekly.
1890s - Women are depicted outside the home in a non-domestic setting for the first time in bicycle ads.
1890s - Advertising manuals increasingly recommend the use of post cards as a low cost means of direct communication with consumers.
1841 - Volney B. Palmer opens the first American advertising agency, in Philadelphia.
1850 - Advertising in the New York Tribune doubles between October 1849 and October 1850.
1850 - Phineas T. Barnum brings Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale" to America, employing newspaper ads, handbills, and broadsides to drum up extraordinary interest in this, until now, unknown-to-Americans international singing star. From being relatively anonymous six months prior to her arrival, she is met at the docks by 30,000 New Yorkers - a result of Barnum's advertising campaign.
1851 - I. M. Singer and Company takes out its first patent for the Singer Perpendicular Action Sewing Machine.
1851 - The first issue of the New York Times (under the name "New-York Daily Times") is published.
1851 -Benjamin Bratt is the first to manufacture and mass-market soap in bar form.
1852 - First advertisement for Smith Brother's Cough Candy (drops) appears in a Poughkeepsie, New York paper - the two brothers in the illustration are named "Trade" and "Mark."
1853 - A Boston court rules that Singer infringed on Elias B. Howe's 1846 sewing machine patent, and Singer pays Howe $15,000 in the settlement.
1853 - Railroad lines reach west as far as the Mississippi River.
1856 - Mathew Brady advertises his services of "photographs, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes" in the New York Herald paper. His inventive use of type in the ad goes against the newspaper industry standard of all-agate and all same-size type used for advertisements in the papers.
1856 - Robert Bonner is the first to run a full-page ad in a paper, advertising his own literary paper, the New York Ledger.
1858 - First Transatlantic cable laid, between Ireland and Newfoundland.
1860s
1860 - 33,000 patents are issued between 1850 - 1860; only 6,000 patents had been issued in the previous decade.
1861 - The first Sunday edition of the re-named New-York Times is published, capitalizing on interest in news of the Civil War.
1861 - There are twenty advertising agencies in New York City.
1863 - James W. Tufts builds and patents a soda-fountain machine for use in his Boston drugstore.
1864 - William James Carlton begins selling advertising space in newspapers, founding the agency that later became the J. Walter Thompson Company, the oldest American advertising agency in continuous existence.
1865 - George P. Rowell and his friend Horace Dodd open their advertising agency in Boston.
1866 - Transatlantic cable becomes operational.
1867 - The magazine Harper's Bazaar premieres.
1867 - Lord & Taylor is the first company to use double-column advertising in newspapers.
1868 - Vanity Fair magazine begins.
1869 - N. W. Ayer and Sons advertising agency is founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the following year begins advertising its own agency in both general and trade publications.
1869 - E. C. Allan starts the People's Literary Companion, marking the beginning of the "mail-order" periodical.
1869 - The first advertisement for Sapolio soap is published.
1869 - George P. Rowell issues the first Rowell's American Newspaper Directory, providing advertisers with information on the estimated circulation of papers and thus helping to standardize value for space in advertising.
1860s - Advertising begins to appear in nationally distributed monthly magazines.
1870s
1870 - Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe) appears in a Harper's Weekly advertisement endorsing Waltham watches.
1870 - The Boardwalk in Atlantic City is completed.
1870 - Chesebrough Manufacturing Co., makers of Vaseline, is founded.
1870 - 5,091 newspapers are in circulation, compared to 715 in 1830.
1871 - 121 brand names and trademarks are registered with the US Patent Office.
1872 - Montgomery Ward begins mail order business with the issue of its first catalog.
1872 - The Associated Press extends its news service to 200 papers.
1875 - 1,138 brand names and trademarks are registered with the US Patent Office.
1875 - The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, made by the Remington Co., is first advertised in New York papers; the first successfully selling typewriter, the "Remington No. 2," appears in 1878.
1876 - Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.
1877 - The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 occurs. The labor unrest spreads across the country, affecting freight traffic.
1877 - The Washington Post newspaper begins publication with a circulation of 10,000, costing 3 cents a paper.
1878 - Thomas Edison secures basic patent for a phonograph machine.
1878 - J. Walter Thompson buys out William J. Carlton's small ad agency and renames it after himself.
1878 - The American Cereal Co. introduces Quaker Oats as the first mass-marketed breakfast food.
1879 - Ivory soap is named, four years after the formula was accidentally discovered at Procter & Gamble.
1879 - George Eastman patents a process for making dry photographic plates.
1879 - Frank Woolworth opens his first "five and dime" store.
1879 - John Wanamaker places the first whole-page newspaper advertisement by an American department store.
1870s - Charles E. Hires begins advertising Hires Root Beer in the Philadelphia Ledger, expanding over the next two decades into national magazines.
1870s - $1 million dollars is spent annually advertising Lydia Pinkham's Pink Pills.
1870s - Louis Prang, a lithographer and printer, develops the idea of mass-producing small "trade cards" that could be adapted to the needs of individual advertisers at low cost. Thread companies, such as Clark's O.N.T., are among the first to begin nationwide distribution of advertising trade cards.
1870s - In response to the high volume of outdoor advertising (including posters and signs painted on rocks, buildings and barns) in cities and rural areas, several states begin to impose limitations to protect natural scenery from sign painters.
1880s
1880 - Singer Sewing Machines and McCormick Reapers begin to dominate their respective markets.
1880 - John Wanamaker hires John E. Powers, who brings a fresh style to advertising - an honest, direct and fresh appeal emphasizing the style, elegance, comfort and luxury of products. Powers is later called "the father of honest advertising."
1881 - James Bonsack develops an efficient cigarette-rolling machine; until this point cigarettes (like cigars) have been rolled by hand.
1883 - James B. Duke leases the Bonsack rolling machines. This contract ensures that his cost to manufacture cigarettes will be 25% below his competitors.
1883 - Ladies Home Journal and Life Magazine begin publication.
1884 - Linotype machine invented, advancing the use of color in printing.
1885 - The Washington Monument is dedicated.
1885 - New postal regulations reduce the cost of second class mailing to one cent per pound, allowing an almost immediate increase in the number of new subscription-based periodicals.
1886 - Coca-Cola is invented in Atlanta, Georgia by Dr. John S. Pemberton. Pemberton's bookkeeper, Frank Robinson, penned the name Coca-Cola in the flowing script that is still used in advertising today.
1886 - Cosmopolitan magazine begins.
1886 - Sears, Roebuck & Company begins mail-order business.
1887 - Introduction of the "safety bicycle," which had wheels of equal size.
1887 - Congress enacts the Interstate Commerce Act.
1888 - Printer's Ink, the oldest, most prestigious and largest magazine targeted to advertisers, agencies and copywriters is founded by George P. Rowell.
1888 - Eastman begins advertising the first hand-held Kodak camera.
1888 - Congress establishes the Department of Labor.
1889 - James B. Duke spends 20 per cent of the gross sale of his tobacco company earnings ($80,000) towards advertising.
1889 - Munsey's magazine is started.
1880s - Illustrated trade cards reach the height of their popularity, not only with advertisers but also with the American public, which becomes remarkably interested in collecting them.
1890s
1890 - The American Tobacco Company is founded, absorbing over 200 hundred rival firms, and gains control of the cigarette and smoking tobacco industries.
1890 - Literary Digest begins publication.
1890 - J. Walter Thompson Company's billings total over one million dollars.
1890 - The Sherman Anti-Trust Act becomes the first legislation enacted by the United States Congress to curb concentrations of power that interfere with trade and reduce economic competition. It is named for U.S. senator John Sherman, an expert on the regulation of commerce.
1891 - The precursor organization to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) is created under the name Associated Bill Posters Association of United States and Canada. OAAA is not used as the organizational name until 1925.
1891 - Batten and Co. advertising agency is founded by George Batten in New York, merging with another agency in 1928 to form Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne (BBDO).
1891 - Nathan Fowler, in Advertising Age, recommends that because women make most of the purchasing decisions of their household, manufacturers would do well to direct their advertising messages to them.
1892 - Artemus Ward, advertising for Sapolio Soap, sponsors a Captain Andrews' trans-Atlantic voyage in a 14 foot boat to celebrate Columbus' voyage 400 years earlier. The voyage takes 3 months to complete and is widely followed and reported on in the press, providing free advertising for Sapolio soap.
1892 - Vogue magazine begins publication.
1892 -Sears, Roebuck & Co. mails out 8,000 post cards with imitation handwriting across the country. 2,000 orders are received directly from this promotional campaign.
1892 - The Ladies Home Journal announces it will no longer accept patent medicine advertising.
1893 - McClure's Magazine begins publication.
1893 - The Royal Baking Powder Co. is estimated be the biggest newspaper advertiser in the world.
1894 - The R. C. Maxwell Company, the oldest existing outdoor advertising company in America, is created. The company concentrates primarily in the Middle Atlantic states.
1895 - Fred Pabst, president of Pabst Brewing Company, predicts in an essay that beer will become the national beverage of the United States.
1895 - The first US patent for a gasoline powered automobile is given to Charles Duryea.
1895 - The first American automobile race is run from Chicago to Evanston, Illinois and back. Two out of six cars finish the 54 mile long race, with a winning time of 7 hours, 53 minutes. The winner, Charles E. Duryea, that same year places what may be the first automobile advertisement ever, in The Horseless Carriage
1896 - The Monarch Bicycle Company spends $125,000 on advertising, including $10,000 for a bicycle racing crew that tours the country participating in bicycle races under the Monarch name. The company sells 50,000 bicycles in 1896, up from 1,200 sold in 1893.
1896 - J. Walter Thompson Company begins using the Rock of Gibraltar in its advertising for Prudential Insurance Co.
1896 - Full color lithographic advertising prints for Ivory Soap are sent directly from specialty printers to magazine publishers, who bind them into magazines. This practice is soon taken up by other manufacturers.
1896 - The Duryea Motor Wagon opens Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth at Madison Square Garden in New York.
1898 - The Pepsi-Cola formula is created by Caleb Bradham, a New Bern, NC druggist.
1898 - N. W. Ayer & Sons begin using outdoor advertising.
1898 - The National Biscuit Company is founded, and immediately begins advertising its Uneeda Biscuit, employing the N. W. Ayer & Sons advertising agency for a campaign that became very successful.
1899 - J. Walter Thompson Company opens a London office, possibly the first international office of an American advertising agency.
1899 - Eighty companies are making, or preparing to make, automobiles.
1890s - Advertisements for alcohol - wines, liqueurs, and whiskeys - are placed in popular national magazines, such as Harper's Weekly.
1890s - Women are depicted outside the home in a non-domestic setting for the first time in bicycle ads.
1890s - Advertising manuals increasingly recommend the use of post cards as a low cost means of direct communication with consumers.
Witty Sayings by Steven Wright
I woke up one morning and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates.
I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Borrow money from pessimists - they don’t expect it back.
Half the people you know are below average.
99% of lawyers give the rest a bad name.
42.7% of all statistics are made up on the spot
If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met
OK, so what’s the speed of dark?
How do you tell when you’re out of invisible ink?
Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
Hard work pays off in the future, laziness pays off now.
I intend to live forever - so far, so good.
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