U.S. Armed forces were not desegregated until 1948.
Cheep Trills
You can estimate the outdoor temperature by counting cricket chirps. To convert chirps to degrees Fahrenheit, count the number of chirps in 14 seconds, and then add 40 to get the temperature.
Source: Old Farmer’s Almanac http://tinyurl.com/6tygkwz
Gross Grocery Cart
The handles of grocery carts rank third on the list of the germiest public surfaces to touch (behind playground equipment and armrests of public transportation).
Source: snopes.com http://www.snopes.com/medical/disease/cart.asp
Poorhouse Horrors
All too often, babies in 18th-century poorhouses were given gin to quiet them. In 1751, nine thousand English children died of alcohol poisoning.
The Gin Craze
William Hogarth's Gin Lane, 1751
I’m sure most families have standard phrases they use with one another, inside jokes that others might not necessarily get. One of my family’s is from the 1968 musical version of Oliver Twist. There’s a scene, in Fagin’s lair, where one of the pickpocket-boys shouts, “These sausages are moldy!” And Fagin yells back, “Shut up and drink your gin!”
So we’ll often snarl “Shut up and drink your gin!” to our kids (usually with a Cockney accent), whenever someone complains about the food. It’s a funny line, even in the movie, partly because it’s so shocking to modern-day sensibilities, that young boys would be drinking gin with their (moldy-sausage) lunch. But it’s historically quite plausible. Kids really did drink gin.
I have a section in my Poop Book about the gin craze of the first half of the 1700s in England. Gin drinking reached epidemic proportions in poor London neighborhoods by the 1730s. For one thing, there weren’t many options when a person wanted something to drink. Tea was still rare and pricey–almost nobody drank it at the beginning of the eighteenth century—it wasn’t until trade routes with China opened that tea became available (another shameless chapter of British history which I’ll eventually blog about). The water was polluted, milk was unsafe, and wine was heavily taxed (due to war with France).
In contrast, gin was cheap, reasonably tasty, and highly intoxicating. It quickly became cheaper as more and more people made and sold it illegally. The British government was duly alarmed by the drinking in the laboring classes, because gin disabled people for useful labor. All kinds of legislation was passed to regulate the spirits trade, but the regulations went largely unenforced—in the large and still-growing working class neighborhoods, few police patrolled the neighborhoods. Selling gin was one of the few occupations available to women, way preferable to prostitution, and gin shops were an attractive social option for females who didn’t feel like hanging around in the seedy alehouses. Gin shops popped up on practically every street corner.
You could get intoxicated for a penny and roaring, falling-down drunk for three. Night-soil men were rewarded with a bottle of gin as a tip after shoveling out a homeowner’s cesspit. In poorhouses, babies were given gin to quiet them. Often, tragically, the quiet was permanent.
Wiggle Room
In 19th-century London, water companies made no effort to filter the drinking water pumped in from the Thames. On several occasions, live eels came wriggling out of people’s faucets.
source: Liza Picard, Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840 – 1870
Don’t Fire Until You Smell their Eau de Parfum
Crusading warriors doused themselves with perfume before battle, believing that perfumed clothing would bring good luck.
Source: Reader’s Digest Everyday Life Through the Ages
Woad Warriors
Illustration of German woad mill in Thuringia from an 18th century book by Daniel Gottfried Schreber .
Last week I blogged about the history of the color purple. In past posts I’ve talked about the color red, and the color green. Today it’s going to be the color blue.
Perhaps you’ve seen the movie Braveheart, which stars Mel Gibson as a thirteenth-century Scottish warrior named William Wallace. Wallace led a rebellion against the British, who eventually captured and rather enthusiastically executed him. In the movie’s battle scenes, Wallace and his men have smeared their skin with a lovely blue war paint–called woad. (There’s a link to a picture, here.) The effect is pretty striking, and warrior-like. But it is also anachronistic; Britons did paint themselves blue when they went into battle, but they were fighting the ancient Romans, not the British, and they did so in the first, not the thirteenth, century. Whatever. On to woad.
Producing woad was a nasty, smelly business. The plant, Isatis tinctoria, used to be found throughout Europe. The leaves were picked, then crushed and kneaded into balls, which turned the workers’ hands black. The balls were dried and then ground into powder. Then the powder had to be watered and allowed to ferment and oxidize. This process was called couching. When it was dry, the powdered woad was packed and sent to the dyer.
The dyer poured hot water onto the woad and mixed it with urine. Then the mixture was left to ferment for several more days. The fermentation process produced a horrible, sulfurous odor which smelled, frankly, like poop. It smelled so disgusting, Queen Elizabeth the 1st banned woad production within five miles of any royal residence. But it did turn fabrics a lovely shade of blue.
Woad was used in England to dye the coats of military officers and policemen as late as the 1930s.
Window Swipers
For centuries, glass windows were a luxury reserved for the wealthy. In Tudor England, windows were designed as removable casements, so people could take them when they moved.
Smoking Gunners
Cigarette smoking became popular during the Crimean War (1854-6). British soldiers acquired the habit from their allies, the Turks.