Same Damn Story

…

Different century. Different headlines. Same damn story.

History rarely offers answers but it does give us an opportunity to learn—if we pay attention. When we don’t, it tries again.

Here we’ll explore the strange, ironic, and often unsettling parallels between the past and the present.

Different century. Different headlines. Same damn story.

stories

  • US Murder Promoting Arms, Co

    What “brain-swampness” to assume that pistols are bought for murder… This ad was posted in The Detective, a magazine for law enforcement distributed throughout the country in the late 1800s-early 1900s. Though the ad is horrifying, the magazines do make for some interesting reading. You can find many issues archived online HERE

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  • If she lives…

    in 1910, Alma Landgren, a married mother of two, suffered days of “untold and constant agony” before dying of peritonitis, a bacterial infection and common cause of abortion-related deaths before antibiotics were available. The doctor performing Alma’s “illegal operation” was incompetent, yes, but Alma had been poor and desperate. To go to the hospital- and…

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  • Those addicted to cigarettes

    “Among the men addicted to cigarettes are to be found those who detest it the most…” Sacramento Union, 1895 … According to the Sacramento Union on Feb. 6, 1896, some of the best physicians in New York were warning that “the boy who became a confirmed cigarette smoker at age of ten was reasonably sure…

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Crazy Quotes

Coming soon

  • The Price of Exclusion…

    …There can be no doubt… that any law passed by a State which shall exclude the citizens of a foreign country with whom we are at peace, or which shall impose upon them unusual and oppressive conditions, would be an interference with the relations subsisting between the United States and the Government whose citizens were…

  • Did Woke and DEI Stop a Harris Election?

    It was weeks before I heard someone say it—and I was glued to the news (granted, MY more progressive NPR and BBC news) after Trump won the 2024 election. But still, it was weeks after the election before I heard one straight talking woman called it out. She acknowledged that Harris’s defeat may have been…

  • Bell Bottoms as sign of rebellion

    Talk about random. I am researching an early San Francisco pickpocket named Annie Piggott and learned that when her first husband William Cronin was a teen in 1884, he longed to be a hoodlum (which was basically a lazy young man prone to petty theft and vandalism when he was bored) . William thought he…

  • ladies wishing to enlarge their busts…

    A quick google search tells me we call this breast “enhancement” or “augmentation” now . And apparently some companies will do the job (small, large, xl, xxl sizes) for as little as $2,500. In case one was wondering, this was also included in google’s results: Can you enlarge breasts without surgery? The National Library of…