Tag: New Haven

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Post author By Betz
Post date January 12, 2022

Have a drink with: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Elementary, my dear Watson.

Ask him about: ghosts

In the early 1920s, folks in America were generally worn out, in a not unfamiliar way. The geopolitical situation was fraught in the wake of World War I, racial tension was high after the 1919 “Red Summer” race riots, extreme weather events popped up to keep people generally bewildered and awash in adrenaline, and oh, by the way, giant influenza pandemic.

Which goes a fair way to explain why spiritualism – the school of thought that believes we humans can connect with the spirits of the deceased in the great beyond through means like mediums, spirit writing, channeling and photography – experienced a resurgence of popularity in the early 20th century. And there were few spiritualist advocates more ardent – or more famous – than Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who toured America in 1922 waving a Go-Team-Go flag for the spiritualist cause.

Tags Author!, New Haven, Spooks & Spirits, Woo-woo

20th Century

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

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 20th Century

Sarah Winchester

Post author By Betz
Post date February 13, 2018

Have a drink with: Sarah Winchester
40BR, 30BA; move-in ready!

Ask her about: Extreme Home Makeover, Spectral Edition

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the star of the recent suspense film Winchester is Helen Mirren. She is, after all, a certified badass; a superb actress; and well kitted out for the job in a dour stare and a dramatic swath of black Victorian lace.

In fact, though, the star of the film is a house, purportedly as haunted in reality as it is on film. The Winchester Mystery House, as it’s popularly known, is a 160-room Queen Anne-style mansion in modern-day Silicon Valley, created by the real-life version of Mirren’s character Sarah Winchester. And as a 1940s tourism brochure points out, “The World’s Largest, Oddest Dwelling” is not your typical real estate listing.

So why spend more than three decades building an ooky, nonsensical Queen Anne monstrosity, albeit one with very nice amenities? If you believe the legend, it’s because Sarah Winchester was trying to manage a tenant roster of very unhappy ghosts.

Tags Film & TV, Guns, New Haven, Spooks & Spirits, Woo-woo

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

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

19th Century

Delia Bacon

Post author By Betz
Post date July 31, 2016

Have a drink with: Delia Bacon
“…very wise in the doctrine of consequences.”

Ask her about: fair and balanced journalism

Once upon a time, two crazies went head-to-head in a public challenge. It was a deeply partisan fight marked by high emotions and questionable discretion, and in the end the loudmouthed, cowardly male nut job won in a maddeningly close vote by going after his intelligent but awkward female opponent with sexism and misdirection.

This was 1847, by the way. Have we learned nothing?

Tags Author!, Kick-Ass Ladies, Megalomania, New Haven, Politics, Trials

19th Century

John C. Calhoun

Post author By Betz
Post date May 9, 2016

Have a drink with: John C. Calhoun
The “cast-iron man,” nullifier, racist.

Ask him about: getting into college

Yale University recently announced that it would retain the name of 19th century politician and slavery advocate John C. Calhoun on one of its twelve undergraduate residential colleges. The decision has been broadly condemned: on Twitter, #FormerlyKnownAsCalhoun quickly topped the trends list, and singer Janelle Monae used Yale’s Spring Fling stage to lead protest chants, calling Calhoun a “white supremacist.”

In a note to the Yale community, university president Peter Salovey justified the decision with the statement that removing Calhoun’s name “obscures the legacy of slavery rather than addressing it.”

But was John Calhoun history’s intolerant yet benign uncle, whom we harmlessly leave at the dinner table to rant, and should we care that his name’s on an Ivy League building?

Tags Black America, Civil War, Connecticut, Corrupt Bargain, Jackassery, Naming Rights, New Haven, Politics, Slavery