Douglas Rodger saluted American workers with this Labor Day cartoon in the San Francisco News a century ago, but, in Chicago, my grandmother was involved in a different sort of labor, and I am rising to a point of personal privilege today. In those days, fathers were banished to the waiting room, and so in […]
John Darkow leads us off with both a reminder of what Memorial Day is about, and how it differs from Veteran’s Day. There were, understandably, a lot of days of recollection in the wake of the Civil War in which 750,000 died, and several versions of how those days were gathered into one national holiday, […]
New Year’s cartoons are a mandatory piece each January 1, and Alfred Brewerton didn’t try for anything breakthrough with this 1924 greeting for readers of the Atlanta Journal. I suppose that might strike some people as lazy, but I prefer to see it as an example of restraint, while the amount of detail — achieved […]
As you are reading this, I am en route to the AAEC Convention in San Francisco, which I will report on in the coming days. While you wait, and while I fly, here is what you’d have read in a California paper had you picked one up a century ago today. 1923 was a pretty […]
The first Daylight Saving Time changeover was March 30, 1918, back when photographic set pieces like this, featuring small children in hastily-made costumes, were a fading but still present part of newspaper graphics. One complication was that the next day was Easter, but the good people of Harrisburg, PA, didn’t have to worry about […]
Happy New Year 1897 There is an old tradition in New Year’s cartoons of looking forward to a more prosperous future, and it goes back at least 125 years to this piece from the Brooklyn Eagle, unsigned but credited to the New York Press, a crosstown paper whose writers, according to Wikipedia, came up […]
I was going to avoid politics today, but I’m not sure this Candorville counts as politics so much as sociology. Yesterday’s social media postings were full of white folks being shocked and righteously indignant that the original Independence Day didn’t free anyone but them. It reminded me of my oft-told story of coming away from […]
One of the keys to looking up contemporary coverage of historic moments is that you really have to look at the newspapers of the next day, though if you look at June 6, 1944, the time difference between France and even the East Coast of the United States meant that morning papers who were on […]
One of these women is turning 94 today and the other is my great-granddaughter and thus her great-great-grandaughter. So, in honor of the occasion, here are some cartoons my grandfather might have read in the newspaper when he wasn’t pacing the floor on September 1, 1924, which is what expectant fathers did in those days. […]