Old Newspaper resource examples

Old Newspaper resource examples..

Information regarding the 1890's

(from a class overview site)

It's difficult to imagine today, but once movie theaters were palaces.

• For 25 cents, every moviegoer was royalty.

The 1890s was marked by a rage for competitive athletics and out-of-door activities of all kinds.

• A new sport swept the college campuses--football.

• To fill the winter gap, basketball was invented in 1891.

• Wrestling followed, as did winter carnival and track meets.

• Another sport newly imported into America during the 1890s was golf.

Bicycles became a craze in the 1890s.

• There were only a million bikes in America in 1893, but seven year later there were 10 million.

Even popular music was transformed.

• The most popular song of the 1890s was Ta-ra-ra-boom-der-e.

• Ragtime became a craze among whites for the first time.

For the first time, the Pledge of Allegiance was adopted in schools.

• It was in the 1890s that John Philip Sousa wrote his patriotic military songs like "The Stars and Stripes Forever."

A new middle class began to appear after 1890, white collar employees who held bureaucratic jobs in the nation's growing corporations.

• Room for advancement was limited and the amount of autonomy one had in one's job was narrowly circumscribed.

• The time clock, introduced into offices and factories during the 1890s was the defining symbol of the changing nature of work.

Anything that required the use of water was hard work.

• There was only one way to obtain water--by hand.

• The source of water could be either a stream or a well.

• If the source was a stream, water had to be carried to the house.

• If the source was a well, it had to be lifted to the surface, a bucket at a time.

• It had to be lifted quite a way, since the average depth of a well was about 50 feet.

• The average person used 40 gallons of water every day, the average family 200 gallons--4/5s of a ton each day, 300 tons a year.

• Just to pump the water by hand and carry it to the house required a person to devote 63 8-hour days a year and walk 1,750 miles.

• Each bucket of water weighed 30 pounds.

• In many areas, a wife not only had to haul water, she had to haul wood, to use in wood-burning stoves.

Then there was washday.

• The wash had to be done outside.

• A huge vat of boiling water was suspended over a roaring fire.

• Three zinc washtubs and a washboard were placed nearby.

• The clothes would be scrubbed in the first of the zinc tubs, then scrubbed on the washboard.

• Soap was made from lye, which burned the skin.

• Getting dirt out of clothes required hard scrubbing.

• Next you removed the clothes from the dirty water and placed them in the vat of boiling water.

• Scrubbing wouldn't remove all the dirt, so a woman would get the rest out by punching the clothes with a wooden paddle.

• She would swish the clothes around as hard as she could for 15 minutes in a human imitation of the agitator in an automatic washing machine.

• Then the clothes would be lifted up at the end of a broomstick to let the dirty water drip off.

• They would then be rinsed and wrung out again and placed in a third tub filled with bluing and swished around in it.

• Finally, the clothes were placed in dishpan filled with starch.

• At this point, one load of wash was done.

• A week's wash typically took four loads, one of sheets, one of shirts and white clothing, one of colored clothing, and one of dish towels.

What strategies did the advertisers employ?

• Schlitz beer advertised that its bottles were steam-cleaned.

• In fact all beer bottles at the time were steam-cleaned--but it made it sound as if Schlitz were doing something unique.

• Factory-made furniture from Grand Rapids, Michigan was advertised as "traditional craftsmanship."

• Campbell's Soup was touted as "old fashioned home cooking."

• Many advertisements appropriated the prestige of science and promised to restore health and beauty.

Appeals to notalgia and sentimentality were apparent decades before the phone company's reach out and touch somebody ads.

• More commonly, advertisers invoked the authority of doctors.

• "Is your children run down, frail, delicate, underdeveloped, pale, always tired, easily upset, irritable, backward in school, not himself?"

• "These are the signs of malnutrition. One child in every three--rich and poor alike--is undernourished."

• The way out? Quaker Oats.

• Scott Paper hired the country's leading behaviorist psychologist, John B. Watson, who came up with a campaign to promote toilet paper.

• His ads warned that harsh toilet paper not only caused discomfort but the possibility of infection.

• One advertisement showed a woman lying in a hospital bed, the hapless victim of harsh toilet tissue.

During the 19th century, most Americans spent little money on recreation.

• Most boys and men found amusement in the open countryside, hunting, fishing, swimming, riding, or in such new contests as target shooting.

• Millions of boys learned to play baseball, but it was still a game played on sandlots.

• Attendance at professional games with pitifully small.

• Organized sports, such as basketball, football, wrestling, and golf, were considered affectations of the rich.

• Even in cities, leisure activity was brief, casual, and non-commercial.

• Amusements consisted largely of walks, visiting friends, clustering on street corners, or reading the penny press.

• Inexpensive pleasures were everywhere: organ grinders, street musicians, itinerant acrobats, baked potato vendors, soda dispensers, and hot corn stands.

One sign of change was the rise of the dance hall.

• By the 1910s, over 500 public dance halls had opened their doors in New York City.

• Another sign of change was a sharp increase in the number of excursions to amusement parks, beaches, and picnic grounds.

• Street cars, subways, and excursion boats took individuals to parks.

• Coney Island was the most famous of the new amusement parks.

• In the mid-19th century, Coney Island was a desolate beach near New York.

• By 1880, it had become New York's leading amusement resort, complete with bathhouses, restaurants, dance pavillions, open-air stages, a boardwalk, and circus sideshows.

• By 1900, Coney Island had been transformed into a modern amusement park with thrills, funhouse laughs, and a midway, ferris wheel, roller coasters, and other mechanical rides.

• Ten hours of fun for ten cents read the advertisements.

By the 1890s, refined vaudeville was attracting middle class crowds.

• Lavish vaudeville palaces were constructed.

• Audiences for the first time were told not to talk or stamp their feet during the show.

• Tickets were not cheap.

• Prices raged from 10 cents to $1, so only higher income families could afford to go regularly.

• Particularly popular in such shows were songs concerning childhood, recollections of the old home, and love of mother.

The last 10 years of the 19th century brought a momentous shift in American culture.

• The first modern instruments of mass communication appeared:

• the mass circulation newspaper; the best seller; the mass market magazine; national advertising campaigns.

In 1898, the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) launched the first million dollar national advertising capaign.

• It succeeded in making Uneeda biscuits, packed in a waterproof "In-er-Seal box," a popular household item.

One of the great aims of artists at the end of the 19th century was to reproduce realistically the most important element of human experience--movement.

• Earlier paintings gave no impression of movement--and the goal of impressionist painters in Europe and America was to capture on canvas a sense of motion.

• All later movements in art have similarly been preoccupied with capturing a sense of dynamism and movement.

• At the end of the 19th century, a large number of individuals were searching for some means of capturing and then reproducing the movements of life seething around them.

• The late 19th century was the great age of realism in fiction, and it was the age of the machine.

• No wonder many inventors eagerly pursued the dream of a machine that would reproduce motion.

• The problem was not a new one.

• Indeed, virtually all the discoveries necessary to produce moving pictures were known as early as the 1640s.

• In the 2nd century a.d. the ancient philosopher Ptolemy had described a trick our eyes play upon us--a trick he called the persistence of vision.

• What he discovered was that the eye, upon receiving an image, retains it in the retina for a tenth to a 20th of a second.

By 1640, an early slide projector, known as a magic lantern, gave a series of drawings a sense of motion.

• But it was only when a large number of scientists became interested in the problem of making pictures that moved that these ideas were made into a practical reality.

• Photography required the subject to remain utterly motionless for several moments to record an image on a glass plate.

• In 1877, Eadweard Muybridge would line up 24 cameras along the edge of a racetrack, and by tripping their shutters showed that all four of a horse's hooves left the ground when it was running.

• In the late 1880s, shortly after inventing the phonograph, Thomas Edison became interested in the problem of creating moving pictures.

At first, his pictures were no more than 15 seconds long.

• His first film showed a human sneeze.

• He also filmed such well known personalities as Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley and recreated historical incidents such as the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots, using trick photography.

• The earliest "movies" did not tell stories.

• They were called "actualities"--since they simply displayed scenes of life from the present or the past.

• Even when the first stories were screened, they were assembled by exhibitors, not by the moviemakers themselves.

Edwin Porter.

• Rummaging around Edison's laboratory, he found a great many bits of film dealing with fire and firemen.

• With a fine sense of economy, he decided to use them.

• He hired some actors to play a heroic fire chief and a mother and a child waiting for rescue at the window of a burning building.

• When he was finished he had made the first American dramatic film, The Life of an American Fireman.

• He also used the first closeup and built his closing scene out of three intercut but separate shots: the firefighter's arrival at the fire, the mother and children registering terror, and the descent down the ladder to safety.

• In 1903, Porter made movie history when he made The Great Train Robbery.

• As he set to work, the newspapers had reported a rash of train robberies.

• He had a chance to move his camera outdoors and to record a chase. The picture was crude; the camera remained at eye level and at a distance in all shots.

• But the picture brought to the screen several staples: the western and the chase.

• The film was ten minutes long.