Tag: Crime & Punishment

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19th Century

John Colt

Have a drink with: John Colt
Double-entry bookkeeping and axe murder

Ask him about: packing advice

You’ve probably heard of Samuel Colt, especially with gun rights so prominently in the news. Not only was Colt one of America’s most well-known gun manufacturers, he used the eager 19th century press to transform gun ownership from a largely utilitarian act into a totem of defiant individualism. An 1860 Colt corporate advertisement in Knickerbocker magazine plainly advertised pistols, rifles, carbines and shotguns to the American public as the needful way to “afford surest protection to your family, your life and your property;” and it was around this time that an oft-repeated adage made its way into American discourse: “God made little men, and God made big men. But bless Col. Colt, he made every man equal.”

But Sam was not the only blood-soaked weirdo in his family. Samuel Colt was an enterprising businessman, if narcissistic, morally flexible and utterly unconcerned with the damage his products would do (also, he once made a living hawking nitrous oxide as a “doctor”). His older brother John Colt, though, was a riverboat gambler, admitted perjurer and forger, an accountant of some note, and a semi-public figure who earned public pooh-poohs for cohabiting with his pregnant girlfriend. Oh, and he also went on trial in 1842 for axe murder.

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19th Century

The U.S. Capitol

Have a drink with: You. Just have a drink.
2021’s off to a start, huh?

Talk about: What wine goes with an attempted coup?

U.S. Capitol after burning by the British, 1814
U.S. Capitol after burning by the British, 1814 (Library of Congress)

Yesterday’s breach of the United States Capitol by a shaggy horde of insurrectionists egged on by the President of the United States was a historical anomaly of the worst kind: the first intrusion into the Capitol by an unwelcome force since the British invasion of Washington during the War of 1812. In the late summer of 1814, British forces tore through the District and laid waste to government buildings, including a fiery effort against the still-incomplete Capitol building.

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19th Century

Historic Influencer Wildfires

Have a drink with: Mark Twain & Henry David Thoreau
Bring water, though.

Ask them about: grilling tips

One of the current West Coast wildfires made news recently when investigation revealed it had been started by smoke bombs at a California gender reveal party. The accident (not the first of its kind, following a similar fire in 2017) has drawn harsh criticism, including from the blogger who invented the party trend – but this is not the first time fame-seekers have tried to duck responsibility for errant wildfire.

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19th Century 20th Century

Postal Inspectors

Have a drink with: Postal Inspectors
Don’t mess with the postal service.

Ask them about: Snow, rain, gloom of night, Tommy guns

When former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was arrested recently on charges of defrauding donors to an online fundraising campaign known as “We Build the Wall,” it was by agents of the United States Postal Inspection Service. This may seem surprising to many of us, who typically think of the postal service as consisting of affable, hardworking people who look unusually good in shorts and the occasional pith helmet, but for most of American history, the Post Office has been home to the nation’s most powerful federal law enforcement.

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20th Century

Tommy Fitz

Have (many) drinks with: Thomas Fitzpatrick
Hold my beer.

Ask him about: air traffic control

Just last month, a small plane made an emergency landing on a busy street in Washington state (apparently even managing, no small feat, to stop for a red light). These sort of landings are not uncommon, as unusual as they may seem: in the past few months of 2019 alone, small craft have needed to land in decidedly non-airport locations in Florida, California and New Jersey.

For the most part, though, these pilots made the best of a bad situation, and certainly didn’t start their flights thinking they would have to come up with creative landing plans. Back in 1950s New York City, however, there was one pilot in particular who not only enjoyed the practice of, shall we say, non-traditional landings, he very purposely drunk-landed a Cessna on a New York City street. Twice.

Meet Tommy Fitz.

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19th Century

The Stomach Rebellion

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.

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19th Century

Victorian Kleptomaniacs

Have a drink with: The Store Detective
Enemy of deviant feminist candy thieves!

Ask her about: hiding a football field’s worth of fabric in your skirt

Victorian Kleptomania

The modern department store came into its own in the 19th century, as retailers jumped feet-first into the growing Barnumesque sense of spectacle suddenly required to get a consumer’s attention (and their disposable income) in a mass-media society. In an effort to court customers, and to change what it even meant to “need” something, 19th century department stores went all-out in terms of decor and attraction: one Chicago store contained a “reproduction of a gold mine in active operation,” and a New York store had live lizards on hand to add some extra flair to a display, meaning that eventually “the police had to interfere to disperse the crowds.” Other stores offered enticements – free ice cream, a complimentary tea salon, cooking classes.

Much as people joke today about the porn industry being the inevitable first-to-market as far as any technology is concerned, department stores were that innovator in the 19th century. If you wanted to see huge plate glass windows, elevators and escalators, or grand displays of electric lighting, department stores were the place to go – and they were remarkable in that they were specific retail spaces in ways none had been before. Window shopping, for the first time, became a thing.

Stealing also became a thing.

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19th Century

The Dissection Riots

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

Ask them about: Buying your own school supplies

Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven

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.

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19th Century

Daniel Sickles

Have a drink with: Daniel Sickles
Once I was the King of Spain…

Ask him about: What’s the name of his other leg?

Daniel Sickles

Daniel Sickles sat weeping in a Washington, D.C. jail in 1859. The young, charismatic New York Congressman was an up-and-coming star in American politics – a favorite of President James Buchanan, in fact – and he was sitting in a dirty jail cell, heartbroken and awaiting trial for murdering his wife’s lover.

But before you feel too sorry for him, consider this: Daniel Sickles was a tool. How much of a tool?

He robbed the mail to take a political adversary’s advertisements out of circulation.

He was indicted for various financial schemes, including selling fake news subscriptions so he could drink the $1,000 profit at an upscale bar.

He took campaign contributions from his favorite prostitute, whom he also brought along as his companion and introduced to Queen Victoria while on assignment as James Buchanan’s secretary in London. While his pregnant wife was at home.

Whom he’d seduced, knocked up and married when she was sixteen.

After sleeping with her mother.

So his jailhouse blubbering is really a matter of the pot calling the kettle slutty, but you can thank Sickles for creating something we still use today: temporary insanity.

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19th Century

Madame Tussaud

Have a drink with: Marie Tussaud
Utility, amusement, severed heads.

Ask her about: working motherhood

Looking forward to Halloween, I’m at Atlas Obscura today writing about Madame Marie Tussaud, the 19th century entertainer and artist who got her start making death masks of decapitated French revolutionaries. Marie left France at forty years old, with her toddler and a bag of wax heads in tow, ready to bet on a new life (one that did not include her husband, who she’d as soon have smacked with a two-by-four). She knew that the public loved two things – royal tabloid news and bloody Victorian crime – and she gladly obliged with newer and better attractions every year, parading a collection of wax notables around England and Scotland for twenty years before settling in a sprawling London gallery. She died in 1850 with credit for Britain’s most popular tourist attraction, an institution that in intervening years has given rise to a collection of two dozen global wax museums.

Click over to Atlas Obscura to read the whole story. Meanwhile…

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