Tag: Connecticut

Glenn Miller

Post author By Betz
Post date December 4, 2019

Have a drink with: Glenn Miller
Pennsylvania six-five-thousand!

Ask him about: giving Sousa some swing

Chances are, if I say “Glenn Miller,” something like “Moonlight Serenade” floats into your mind on cottony clouds, the dreamy musical equivalent of a Vaseline filter; or maybe it’s the sharp, perky big-band swing of “In the Mood.” Point is, the phrase “early-morning scourge of stuffy Yale professors” is not high on the list of speedy free associations. But in 1943, that was exactly on the nose – and Glenn Miller was waking up sleepy Ivy League students. For America.

Tags Connecticut, Military, Music, New Haven, World War II, Yale

19th Century

The Stomach Rebellion

Post author By Betz
Post date August 12, 2019

Have a drink at: Your College Dining Hall
Cabbage: now with extra protein!

Discuss: FOOD FIGHT

Today, a college’s dining hall is part of its overall outreach in the competition to attract students, and to keep them happy and achieving while they’re on campus. So much is put into the food and the architecture that travel magazines and college prep companies actually rank colleges by the quality and appeal of their food. This is a far cry from the college dining experience of the nineteenth century: in the summer of 1828, students at Yale College got so upset with their dining experience that they undertook a group protest that came to be known as the “Bread and Butter Rebellion” or the “Stomach Rebellion,” and it got so heated that the university president had to expel everybody to get them to cool the eff down.

You can see why a pasta station may be a better solution.

Tags Angry Mob, Comic Relief, Connecticut, Crime & Punishment, Food & Cooking, Jackassery, New Haven, Yale

19th Century

Daylight Saving Time

Post author By Betz
Post date March 13, 2019

Have a drink with: Daylight Saving Time
Spring forward, fall back.

Ask about: How do I change the clock in my car, again?

You may think you have it bad this week, with Daylight Saving Time going into effect: it’s hard to get going in the dark mornings, who knows which clocks you forgot to change, and if the news is to be believed, we get so collectively thrown out of whack by the annual shift in time that there is a nationwide uptick in everything from depression rates to car accidents.

The Sunshine Protection Act, introduced by Senator Marco Rubio in Congress for the second time, aims to get rid of the whole process once and for all by keeping the nation on Daylight Saving Time (which we entered last weekend by turning clocks ahead one hour) year-round. The proposal has been covered in the news extensively this week, with favorable public response.

It’s definitely among the nicer approaches that have historically been taken towards regulating time changes.

In Connecticut, we went ahead and made them criminal.

Tags Connecticut, Law Geekery, Newspapers, Time

19th Century

Elias Howe

Post author By Betz
Post date February 22, 2019

Have a drink with: Elias Howe
Adventures in sewing: now with cannibals!

Ask him about: patent trolls

It’s kind of easy to knock Elias Howe, historically speaking. There is a statue of him in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he is claimed as a famous son despite the fact that he was born in Massachusetts; he is largely credited with inventing the sewing machine despite the fact that he sort of didn’t; and some biographies describe him as a hero of the Civil War despite the fact that he was a 40-year-old private.

But let’s cut the guy some slack, really. Because there’s a lot to love about Elias Howe – and not just that he was solid Daguerreotype Boyfriend material:

This is a guy who created the United States’ first patent war, all while insisting his creative inspiration came from a dream about being held captive by cannibals.

Tags Connecticut, Craft Hour, Entrepreneurship, Law Geekery

19th Century

Henry Opukaha’ia

Post author By Betz
Post date October 9, 2018

Have a drink with: Henry Opukaha’ia
Aloha oe.

Ask him about: No pineapple on Pepe’s, right?

We’ve talked before about how Connecticut has given the world a wide assortment of innovations, some good, some bad: speed limits, law schools and scary Puritan judges, sure, but also Pepe’s pizza, submarines, constitutional government (maybe?) and P.T. Barnum.

With a check mark in each column: Henry Opukaha’ia. Good news: remarkable Hawaiian visits Connecticut, absolutely crushes scholarly agenda and impresses the pants off of the leading religious voices of his day. Bad news: his fan club includes a legion of New England missionaries bound for the Pacific.

Tags BIPOC, Connecticut, Explorers & Adventure, Imperialism, New Haven, Religion & Reform, Ships & sailing

18th Century

The Proprietors

Post author By Betz
Post date August 26, 2018

Have a drink with: The Committee of the Proprietors of Common and Undivided Lands at New Haven
Say that one five times fast.

Ask them about: Food trucks, church buildings and underground parking structures

There are situations in which you are pleased to find your hometown has made national news. A horrific instance of mass overdose is emphatically not one of them. And as news coverage has attempted to understand and respond to a public health crisis of this particular impact, all but the most local coverage has overlooked one idiosyncratic fact about the administration of the space in question: the city of New Haven, Connecticut is not the owner of the New Haven Green.

Tags Civics, Connecticut, New Haven, Politics

19th Century

The Dissection Riots

Post author By Betz
Post date January 20, 2018

Have a drink with: The Yale Medical School Class of 1824
Did you bring a shovel?

Ask them about: Buying your own school supplies

On a cold January morning almost 200 years ago in New Haven, Connecticut, someone came knocking on Jonathan Knight’s door. This itself was not necessarily unusual, as Knight had his thumb in many of the town’s proverbial pies: in addition to serving as a local doctor, he was also a professor at the young Medical Institution of Yale College. What was unusual, for the pre-breakfast slot on a Monday morning, was that the caller was a lawyer named General Kimberly, and that he was deeply concerned that some of the school’s medical students had apparently and emphatically not spent their Sunday at church.

Tags Angry Mob, Connecticut, Crime & Punishment, Doctor in the House?, Law Geekery, New Haven

20th Century

The Speed Limit

Post author By Betz
Post date January 10, 2017

Skip drinks because it’s: The Speed Limit
You there, do you know how fast you were going?

Ask it about: Can it drive 55?

Most of us like to think that history is a parade of accomplishments, but when you get down to it somebody has to invent the everyday stuff, too – and as much as it pains me to say so, my home state has done more than most in making the world a duller place. Go ahead and thank Connecticut, pioneer of the boring, for we have given you: wooden nutmeg scandals, government paperwork, car taxes, the insurance industry, and the nation’s first law school.

And as if that weren’t enough, in 1901, my home state was first in the country to set a speed limit for motor vehicles.

No city driving over 12 MPH, now. In the burbs, you can punch it up to 15.

Tags Cars, Connecticut, Law Geekery, Wet Blankets

18th Century

David Bushnell

Post author By Betz
Post date October 24, 2016

Have a drink with: David Bushnell
Damn the torpedoes.

Ask him about: The one that got away

Folks in Warrenton, Georgia were understandably sad when Doctor David Bush passed away in 1826. Single and in his eighties at the time of his death, the old man was a local institution: in more than thirty years in town Bush had practiced medicine, been active in local politics and even set up an area school. Folks knew the local doctor was quiet, civic-minded and accomplished.

So his secret identity may have come as a bit of a surprise.

Tags Colonial America, Connecticut, DIY, Founding Fathers, Makers, Science!, Ships & sailing

17th Century

Surly Puritan Judges

Post author By Betz
Post date September 30, 2016

Have a drink with: New Haven Puritans
Judge swung his fist down, plunk plunk…

Ask them about: Anything but Quakers.

It’s election season, which means we are faced with ample opportunity to confront our worst tendencies and unresolved problems as a society, along with the inevitable call to harken back to a better, simpler, more moral time in American history.

Just so we’re clear, though, that time was not the 17th century.

Consider The Case of the Piglet’s Paternity, a fascinating collection of thirty-three cases heard before the Puritan courts of the 17th century New Haven Colony and superbly edited by Connecticut superior court judge Jon Blue. We can learn a few things from this book:

Do not let a few instances of good justice wallpaper over a majority approach that marginalizes citizens and preserves a fear-based status quo.
Don’t serve sailors booze by the quart.

Tags Colonial America, Connecticut, Law Geekery, New Haven, Politics, Puritans, Religion & Reform, Trials