Innovation
When Fence Lines Were Phone Lines
One story we learned at the Legacy of the Plains Museum caught my attention so thoroughly that I think it deserves its own blog post. The first commercial telephone company opened on January 28, 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut. It had 21 subscribers. (I wonder who they were and how they expected to use it.)…
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Road Trip Through History: The Sergeant Floyd River Museum
In some ways, the Sergeant Floyd River Museum in Sioux City, Iowa, feels like the historical equivalent of a set of nesting Russian dolls, with one iteration of Sergeant Floyd fitted into another and then another to make up the whole. The historical heart of the museum is Sergeant Charles Floyd himself. He was…
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Before the GI Bill: The American Expeditionary Forces University
As far as I’m concerned one of the joys of poking about in the historical record is stumbling across tidbits that don’t make it into big picture accounts of historical events. Sometimes they don’t even make it into the smaller-scale stories that I am working on. This is one of those tidbits. It caught my…
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