Twentieth Century
Airships, Blimps, Dirigibles, and Zeppelins
In the weeks since we got home from our Big Road Trip back in June,* I’ve been immersed in the years between the end of World War I and the rise of the Nazis in Germany. One of the things that has captured my imagination is how fascinated people were by aviation in those years.…
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From the Archives: Samuel Gompers and the American Federation of Labor
Yesterday I was walking home from the library with a bag of research books, considering how to spend the long Labor Day weekend. I am working on building the habit of taking Sundays off. (Radical, I know.) And I was musing over whether I could stretch my developing time-off-muscles to include Labor Day. After all,…
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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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