Page not found – Your Daily Dose of Abandoned Memories https://forgottenhistoryblog.com Your Daily Dose of Abandoned Memories Tue, 11 Aug 2020 17:07:11 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/cropped-books-stack-of-three-32x32.png Page not found – Your Daily Dose of Abandoned Memories https://forgottenhistoryblog.com 32 32 The Spanish Flu Didn’t Originate in Spain https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/the-spanish-flu-didnt-originate-in-spain/ Thu, 19 Mar 2020 15:33:06 +0000 https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=983 The Spanish Flu Didn't Originate in Spain

Pandemics have been on everyone’s mind lately, and in these uneasy times, many people are looking to the past for clues about what may be in our future. One pandemic that has been coming up is the influenza pandemic of 1918 in which an estimated 50 to 100 million people died and 500 million people were infected. Most commonly, this pandemic is referred to as the Spanish Flu, however, this disease did not originate in Spain.

While there are several different theories about where the “Spanish Flu” originated, the nickname actually has a different origin. According to Snopes:

The pandemic likely acquired this nickname because of World War I, which was in full swing at the time. The major countries involved in the war were keen to avoid encouraging their enemies, so reports of the extent of the flu were suppressed in Germany, Austria, France, the United Kingdom and the U.S. By contrast, neutral Spain had no need to keep the flu under wraps. That created the false impression that Spain was bearing the brunt of the disease.

Spanish Flue Chicago Public Health Poster

Over the years, many scientists have debated when the pandemic started. Some suggested origins include, the prevailing theory at the time, that is broke out in the World War I trenches of France, with soldiers returning home spreading it throughout the US. A later theory pointed to Kansas, where an influenza outbreak killed 48 doughboys in an Army camp in March 1918. More recently, Historian Mark Humphries has suggested evidence shows this strain may have originated in China and was spread by Chinese laborers who were transported across Canada in 1917 before arriving in Europe. You can read more about this theory at National Geographic.

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More Americans used to vote in midterm elections than presidential elections https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/more-americans-used-to-vote-in-midterm-elections-than-presidential-elections/ Sun, 04 Nov 2018 17:54:25 +0000 https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=932

Here’s a surprising fact about US history: more Americans used to vote in midterm congressional elections than bothered to vote in presidential election years. Today the trend is the exact opposite.

Check out this graph that shows election turnout from the founding of America onward. As you can see, midterm elections were more popular than presidential elections up until about the middle of the 19th century. Why was that?

Early Americans viewed presidents as less powerful than Congress and therefore it was more important to vote for congress than it was for whoever the president was. And it’s not hard to see why: consider that Article One, Section One of the US Constitution did not establish the presidency but instead established Congress. It doesn’t even mention the presidency until later. It reads:

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

In early American history, voters recognized that under the US Constitution, Congress has the power to write laws, the president doesn’t. Congress has the power to establish taxes, the president doesn’t. Congress has the power to declare war, the president doesn’t. More recently in American history, the presidency has become more powerful and Congress has ceded some of its power to the White House, a development that remains very controversial among constitutional scholars and historians.

The fact that more Americans used to vote in midterm congressional elections than in presidential elections becomes more interesting when you consider that initially at first, Americans didn’t have the right to vote for who their senators were. Until the 17th Amendment passed in 1913, US Senators were elected by each state’s legislature. So Americans would vote for their Congressman in the House of Representatives, and their state legislators, who would in turn elect their Senators for them.

Of course, during the period of time that midterm elections were more popular than presidential elections, it’s important to remember who exactly was and wasn’t allowed to vote. Although turnout rates were often high (80% in 1840!), this only counts the number of people who voted as a percent of those eligible to vote in the first place. Women and people of color did not get the ability to vote until later. Although some states had individually given women the right to vote earlier, the 19th Amendment did not guarantee women the franchise in all states until it was adopted in 1920. Similarly, the 15th Amendment was adopted in 1870, which (in promise at least) gave people of color the right to vote. But practically speaking, it wasn’t until the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th Century that that promise became a reality for many:

Although ratified on February 3, 1870, the promise of the 15th Amendment would not be fully realized for almost a century. Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other means, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise African Americans. It would take the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the majority of African Americans in the South were registered to vote.

There was however a brief period of time after the Civil War and the end of slavery but before racist Jim Crowe laws were adopted in the South that saw the temporary rise of African American voters. Read our related article for more about this period called Reconstruction: 23 African Americans Were Elected to Congress Before the Civil Rights Movement.

History aside, voting in midterm congressional elections is critically important.

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The First Woman US State Senator Defeated Her Polygamist Husband in the Election https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/the-first-woman-us-state-senator-defeated-her-polygamist-husband-in-the-election/ Tue, 30 Oct 2018 15:53:25 +0000 https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=918 Utah State Senator Martha Hughes Cannon with daughter Mattie
Despite having a conservative reputation, Utah was the first state to elect a female State Senator in 1896. In the context of the times, it’s not entirely surprising. The first woman to vote legally in an American election was Seraph Young in 1870, 50 years before white women were given the right to vote by the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Many now speculate that the support by Mormon leaders for women’s suffrage was to counteract the negative views of polygamy in the territory and prevent anti-polygamy legislation. Whatever the leader’s intentions, the result was Mormon women actively engaging in women suffrage and politics.

Throughout her life, Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon was a driven woman. She wanted to be a physician, so she learned typesetting and worked her way through medical school. By the age of 25, she had earned four degrees: chemistry, medical, pharmaceutical, and oratory. She returned to Utah to practice medicine at Deseret Hospital.

Martha was a devout Mormon and became the fourth husband of Angus M. Cannon in 1884. Two years earlier the Edmunds Act was passed, which made polygamy a felony in the United States. As the pressure mounted and her husband was arrested for polygamy, Martha exiled herself to Europe to avoid testifying against Angus. While she was gone, Congress passed the Edmunds Tucker Act which, in addition to disincorporating the LDS church, disenfranchised women and took away the right to vote they had in Utah.



When Martha returned to Utah, the Mormon women were rallying together to fight for suffrage. Martha joined their fight and became a leader in the Utah Women’s Suffrage Association and traveled across the country to participate in events with suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In 1896, the women of Utah had their right to vote reinstated by the new state constitution. That fall, there were five open spots in the State Senate. Five Democrats, including Martha, ran against five Republicans, including her husband Angus. The five candidates with the most votes would be elected.

Martha Hughes Cannon and Utah State Senate
The Utah State Senate in 1897. Martha is third from the left in the front row.

Not only did the five Democratic candidates win, but Martha became the first woman to be elected to a State Senate in the US. Martha received 10,288 votes while her husband only received 8,054. Fortunately, the election caused no strife in their marriage, though local newspapers fixated on the competition between them. The Salt Lake Herald famously endorsed Martha before the election, saying: “Mrs. Mattie Hughes Cannon, his wife, is the better man of the two. Send Mrs. Cannon to the State Senate and let Mr. Cannon, as a Republican, remain at home to manage home industry.”

Martha’s impact on Utah was significant, including writing the state’s Sanitation laws and helping to found Utah’s first State Board of Health. She consistently fought for causes she believed in, continuing to help in the National Women’s Suffrage movement and standing up against anti-vaxxers, including apostles in her own church.

Although Martha chose not to run for office at the end of her term because of the birth of her third child, she continued to work at the Utah Board of Health and eventually the National Congress of Tuberculosis. Her legacy is firmly cemented in Utah and the LDS church because of her hard work and unshakable priorities.

Learn more about Martha on Wikipedia and in the book Pioneer, Polygamist, Politician: The Life of Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon by Mari Grana.


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The US Once Stripped American Women of Citizenship if They Married Immigrants https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/expatriation-act-of-1907/ Mon, 21 May 2018 21:44:24 +0000 https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=869

Imagine accidentally losing your citizenship… simply because of the person you got married to! In the early 20th Century, thanks to a law called the Expatriation Act of 1907, thousands of American women found themselves in quite a pickle. This video explains the history:


The documentary film referenced at the end of this video is The Way to Andina.

Once the US Congress passed the Expatriation Act of 1907, American women forfeited their US citizenship if they married foreign born men. Naturally American men who married foreign women kept their citizenship because, well, sexism.

The law stayed in place for several years, stripping several thousand American women of their citizenship, whether they knew it or not when they got married. The law was later updated to omit this clause after women obtained the right to vote and became a political force in their own right. But Congress didn’t formally apologize for stripping American women of their citizenship until quite recently:

In 2013, Daniel Swalm, the grandson of a Minnesota woman who had lost U.S. citizenship under Section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907 for marrying a Swedish immigrant and died without regaining her citizenship, began lobbying Congress to posthumously restore citizenship to women like his grandmother.[16] He contacted his senator Al Franken, who in 2014 sponsored a resolution (S.Res. 402) expressing regret for the passage of the 1907 Act.[17][18] The resolution passed the Senate on May 14 [2014].

And the Expatriation Act of 1907 wasn’t just a symbolic measure either; it affected thousands of American women in all sorts of ways. If you were a citizen one day and not a citizen the next, you lost various legal rights. The text of the Senate apology contained examples of how several American women who lost their citizenship were affected by the law:

Whereas section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907 affected numerous women, such as Florence Bain Gual, a New York City school teacher whose tenure was stripped after 15 years of teaching because she married a foreign national, causing them to face difficulties providing for their families because they lost, or were not able to gain, public employment after marrying a foreign national;

Whereas section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907 prevented women in the United States, such as Ethel MacKenzie from California who was unable to register to vote because she married a foreign national, from participating in the political process and casting ballots in various elections[…]

The documentary film The Way to Andina details the story of another descendent of a woman who lost her citizenship quite accidentally after marrying a foreign born man (in that case from Colombia).

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The creator of Mother’s Day wished she could un-create it because it became too commercial https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/the-true-story-of-mothers-day/ Tue, 15 May 2018 20:05:03 +0000 https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=841 Meet Anna Jarvis, the creator of Mother’s Day. She was a committed peace activist, having cared for both American and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War. When her mother (who had given birth to 11 children!) eventually died in 1905 after years of being cared for by her daughter, Jarvis began a campaign to celebrate mothers everywhere with a holiday devoted to them.

Anna Jarvis’ mother, Ann, had championed the idea of creating a “Mother’s Friendship Day” for mothers of Civil War soldiers on both sides decades earlier but the efforts had never come close to anything like a national holiday. And so Jarvis picked up where her late mother had left off.

After her mother’s passing, Jarvis, then an insurance company advertising editor, began to campaign for the holiday without success for years. The US Congress even scoffed at the proposal, saying that if they created a Mother’s Day, they would also have to create a Mother-In-Law’s Day too.

But a few years later Mother’s Days were celebrated in every single state and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson dedicated the second Sunday in May an official Mother’s Day.

Mission accomplished for Ms Jarvis? Not quite.

A 1920s Hallmark greeting card for Mother’s Day

As celebration of Mother’s Day became more widespread (good!), various companies started cashing in on the trend (bad!). Hallmark started creating specialized Mother’s Day greeting cards in the 1920s, chocolate companies created Mother’s Day chocolates, and florists raised the prices on white carnations, Jarvis’ chosen symbol for the day. The day has been derided as a “Hallmark holiday.”

Eventually Jarvis called for the boycott of Mother’s Day because she felt it had been hijacked by commercial interests. She said:

“A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.”

Jarvis went on to protest the holiday, as TIME Magazine recounts:

Jarvis’ attacks on the commercialization of Mother’s Day became legendary. In 1922, Jarvis endorsed an open boycott against the florists who raised the price of white carnations every May. The following year, she crashed a retail confectioner convention to protest the industry’s economic gouging of the day.

She was, of course, unsuccessful in her repeal efforts of the holiday she created. But her perennial protests did not go unnoticed: Jarvis was eventually thrown in a mental hospital. And who paid the bills to keep her there? Representatives of the greeting card and floral industries, naturally!

As it happens, the activist Jarvis died fairly poor, after having inadvertently created a virtual economic stimulus day for various industries that continue to exploit them to this day. In modern times, the Americans spend a combined $20 billion on greeting cards, flowers, chocolates and more to celebrate the holiday.

As for Jarvis herself? She never got married or had children either; the mother of Mother’s Day wasn’t a mother herself. She died at age 84.

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Disney Made a Cartoon About Menstruation https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/disney-made-a-cartoon-about-menstruation/ Fri, 16 Feb 2018 23:12:42 +0000 https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=824 Disney Teaches School Children About Reproduction
Disney has had plenty of controversy in its past, but this hotly debated short film was not one I ever expected to see. In 1946 Disney released a 10 minute cartoon called The Story of Menstruation. As you might have guessed, this wasn’t one of their typical family-friendly animated movies.

After World War II, Disney was struggling. Their 1940 release of the third Disney feature-length animated film Fantasia was a commercial failure, and Walt searched for other ways to increase revenue at the company. That’s why they accepted a commission from Kotex to create an educational film about menstruation. They hired gynecologist Mason Hohn to make sure the cartoon was scientifically accurate. The film was then used in schools across the United States, creating controversy and rumors along the way. Along with the movie, students were given a booklet called Very Personally Yours (which is mentioned in the cartoon). The pamphlet was full of advertising of Kotex maxipads and actively discouraged the use of tampons as a slight to competitor Tampax.

Disney's Animated Film About Menstruation



As you’d expect for the time period and the Disney brand, the short isn’t very explicit about the subject matter. While we’re shown a diagram of internal female sex organs, while the process of menstruation is explained, there’s no discussion of sex. An egg is impregnated “when a woman is going to have a child.” Also, menstruation blood is depicted as a white flow. The animated film has some strange tips, like don’t use very hot or very cold water when you bathe during your period and to generally avoid “extremes.” Get over your PMS and lack of “pep” by not feeling sorry for yourself.

Disney Animated Movie on Menstruation

Fortunately, we have better references now to educate young women about menstruation. But if you’re curious, watch the entire short film The Story of Menstruation:

Sources: Ozy & Wikipedia.


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1950s American Students Wore Dog Tags to School https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/1950s-american-students-wore-dog-tags-to-school/ Thu, 11 May 2017 16:07:34 +0000 http://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=748 People who grew up in the 1950s agree that the world is a very different place now. Back then, children walked to school with their friends, no worry about having a parent chaperone them. A trip to the corner store for candy or comic books was also a casual affair. But, because of the threat of nuclear war, young students wore dog tags issued by their school.

Referred to as “metal identification tags” these civil defense dog tags were issued to students in school districts across the United States, including New York City, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia. Check out this sobering video where students in Las Vegas are asked to speak to the press about the issuing of dog tags to students and why they’re important. At the end, a young boy speaks about how they will help soldiers identify his body. Chilling.

New York City’s public school system was the first to issue the “identification tags” in February 1952, spending $159,000 to provide them to 2.5 million students. They were instructed to wear them at all times as if they were soldiers in a daily battle against the Soviet Union. Educators also considered other ways to identify the children, including tattoos, identification cards, and fingerprinting all the children. At the time, fingerprinting was considered a terrible infringement of privacy, and worries about destroyed ID cards and illegible tattoos from burnt skin meant the metal tags were the best choice.

For adults reminiscing on their childhood, these tags are a bizarre artifact of typical daily life in the 1950s. While many of these children didn’t understand the full ramifications of regular “duck and cover” drills and wearing these dog tags, it’s a chilling reminder of how much fear and paranoia was a regular part of 1950s American life.



Even adults and students in other parts of the country had opportunities to get their own metal identification tags. You could mail order them or even see your grocer to secure your pair.

Sources:
Paleofuture
Slate
Conelrad
Orlando Sentinel


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A Roomba-Like Cleaner was Patented in 1957 https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/a-cleaner-like-the-roomba-was-patented-in-1957/ Tue, 21 Mar 2017 15:30:03 +0000 http://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=739 Home robots are still an amazing concept, especially for people who grew up watching episodes of “The Jetsons” on television. Roombas were first introduced in 2002, and over 15 million units have been sold worldwide as of this writing. While many people are delighted by their autonomous robot vacuum, most people don’t know that a robot vacuum was first envisioned in the 1950s.

Donald G. Moore patented a robot floor cleaner in 1957. It was controlled by a central console that only required the press of a button to activate the cleaner. The robot would appear and had the functionality to both vacuum and mop your kitchen floor. Unfortunately, a working version of the robot was never built or released to the public.

Watch the robot in action in this promotional film for the RCA Whirlpool “Miracle Kitchen” in 1959 (the robot floor cleaner appears at 11:50):

Source: The Retrofuturist.


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Rasputin is the Reason for “Work of Fiction” Disclaimers in Movie Credits https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/rasputin-is-the-reason-for-work-of-fiction-disclaimers-in-movie-credits/ Sun, 28 Aug 2016 16:10:57 +0000 http://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=731 If you have the patience to sit all the way through the end of a movie’s credit (maybe waiting for a little post-credit Easter egg scene), you’ve probably noticed the disclaimer at the end: This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental. Where did that come from and why do they need to put it on the end of obviously fictitious films like Finding Dory or Star Wars? The answer lies, surprisingly with the famous Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin.

Slate has the full story: “It all started when an exiled Russian prince sued MGM in 1933 over the studio’s Rasputin biopic, claiming that the American production did not accurately depict Rasputin’s murder. And the prince ought to have known, having murdered him.”

The Slate article goes on to detail the MGM production in question Rasputin and the Empress and how the exiled Russian Prince Felix Youssoupoff sued them for defamation. Eventually, MGM had to pay up to his wife and take the film out of circulation to purge the offending scene. The landmark case made the film industry overly cautious and now some form of the “fiction” disclaimer appears at the end of most films.

It’s truly a fascinating story. Get all the details at Slate and check out Prince Felix Youssoupoff’s memoir Lost Splendor: The Amazing Memoirs of the Man Who Killed Rasputin.



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Dr. Seuss Wrote an Adult Book with Illustrations of Naked Women https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/dr-seuss-wrote-an-adult-book-with-illustrations-of-naked-women/ Sun, 21 Aug 2016 15:56:00 +0000 http://forgottenhistoryblog.com/?p=724 Dr. Seuss is one of the most beloved children author’s of all time, creating classic characters and stories like The Cat in the Hat, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and The Lorax. But before he created those characters, Theodore Geisel, was an illustrator for magazines and advertisements. Once he started his career as a children’s author with his first book And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Dr. Seuss wrote another book intended for adult readers.

The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family was one of the few books he wrote for adults, telling the tale of seven Godiva sisters, inspired by the real-life Lady Godiva who rode naked through the streets to protest oppressive taxation. His story tells the story of the naked sisters traveling throughout the land on a quest for “horse truths.” Throughout the story, the sisters appear completely naked and are illustrated as such, though the pictures lack any anatomical details.

The book was published by Random House in 1938 and was later cited as Dr. Seuss’s biggest publishing failure. The original print run of 10,000 copies was estimated to sell only around 2,500 copies. Many reasons are given for the failure. Seuss says it was because he couldn’t draw naked women correctly. At the time the failure was attributed to a hefty $2 price tag during the Depression and the nudity driving away readers. The remaining copies were sold for 25 cents in a chain of cigar stores.

Luckily, the failure of this book can be credited for helping Dr. Seuss focus his energies on the magical children’s books that made up the rest of his career. Due to fan demand, the book was reprinted in 1987. The book is currently out of print, though used copies can be purchased online, and a PDF version is currently available.


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