Source: The Minneapolis Journal, October 4th 1906. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.
According to testimony given by Franks and others, Maud Franks had caught his eye at a metropolitan railway station. She was 18 while Franks was 66 and married. He obtained Maud’s address and later sent her notes and presents, asking for a meeting. When she agreed, he took her to an oyster house off Oxford Street.
The seduction occurred after Franks bought her oysters, champagne and brandy and soda. The end result of this liaison was that Maud Viner fell pregnant and delivered twins. According to one press report, the presiding judge said that:
“..the proceedings in this case were about the most foolish he had ever heard of. Nothing could be more ridiculous than for an old man like the defendant to go trotting about after a young girl like the plaintiff’s daughter. It had been stated in evidence that the defendant caught a cold while looking for the young girl at the Empire [Club]. It served him right. It would have been a good thing if he had caught a few more colds in such discreditable adventures.”
The jury found for the plaintiff, Mr Viner, who was awarded damages of 100 pounds. The fate of Maud Franks and her illegitimate twins is unknown.
Source: Various, inc. Liverpool Mercury, February 9th 1891. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.
Here, Kane reluctantly describes a local delicacy known to other white settlers as “Chinook olives” – or acorns pickled in human urine:
“About a bushel of acorns are placed in a hole dug for the purpose, close to the entrance of the lodge or hut, and covered with a thin layer of grass [and] about half a foot of earth. Every member of the family for the next five or six months regards this hole as the special place of deposit for urine, which on no occasion is to be diverted from [this] legitimate receptacle. Even should a member of the family be sick and unable to reach it for this purpose, the fluid is collected and carried thither.”
According to other sources, these “Chinook olives” were rendered black by the pickling process, after which they were cooked in the ashes of a campfire. Those brave enough to sample them claimed they were soft with a chewy centre and possessed a pungent salty taste but a foul smell.
Source: Paul Kane, The Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America, 1859; The Canadian Journal, 1857. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.
Bowrey was an also an avid writer and a student of foreign lands, cultures and customs. His travel diaries, spanning 1669 to 1679, were discovered and published at the beginning of the 20th century. These papers describe an incident in the mid-1670s when Bowrey and “eight or ten” of his men were on leave in Bengal.
While there they sampled some of the local bhang, or cannabis-infused water. According to Bowrey’s diary, he and his shipmates each paid sixpence for a pint of bhang, which they guzzled down behind locked doors:
“It soon took its operation upon most of us… One of them sat himself down upon the floor and wept bitterly all afternoon; the other, terrified with fear, did put his head into a great jar and continued in that posture for four hours or more… four or five lay upon the carpets highly complimenting each other in high terms… One was quarrelsome and fought with one of the wooden pillars of the porch until he had little skin upon the knuckles of the fingers.”
Bowrey himself “sat sweating for the space of three hours in exceeding measure”. He described bhang as a “bewitching” substance; anyone who uses it for a month or two cannot give it up “without much difficulty”.
Source: Thomas Bowrey, Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal 1669-79, published 1905. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.
“Dear friend, the Peapple is in for making Peas, yes Peas they wand and thay pray that you will make it… before the Lextion [election] there was Bills posted up evrewhere that you would make a change in the cabnet and would make Peas… the tok is about Peas but we cant see it and have not seen it… this cruel Ware has bin going long a nuf…”
I your Truly optaind Servend.”
Source: Letter to Abraham Lincoln, unsigned, Pittsburg, January 16th 1865. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.
Prohibition may also have enjoyed the financial backing of Coca Cola. During debates on the floor of the US Senate in early 1917 James Edgar Martine, the junior Senator from New Jersey, claimed the prohibition movement was being bankrolled by:
“…the splendid wealth acquired through the manufacture of the decoction known as Coca Cola… The owner [of this company] lives in a princely home in Atlanta… there is a lobby there and $50,000 has been put up for the purposes of maintaining the Coca Cola interests… to shut people off from other beverages and hence make them resort to their drinks.”
Coca Cola was itself invented to dodge Atlanta by-laws prohibiting the sale of alcoholic drinks. Despite its cocaine content and narcotic effects, Coca Cola was permitted to be sold as a medicinal tonic rather than an intoxicant. Cocaine was removed from Coca Cola around 1903 and replaced with strong levels of caffeine but many still considered it a stupefying drink with potential dangers to the welfare of those who consumed it.
According to Judge Stark, Coca Cola addiction was responsible for serious social problems in the state of Georgia:
“A half dozen reputable physicians have stated that there are over 300 girls in Atlanta that are Coca Cola fiends and nervous wrecks… Coca Cola and such drinks not only make physical wrecks out of our men but destroy the physical welfare of our women and children and make nervous wrecks of them. There are over 2,700 known Coca Cola fiends in this state, and if all could be numbered it would amount to over 5,000.”
Whether because of prohibition or canny marketing or both, Coca Cola sales boomed over the next decade. In 1920, the company churned out almost 19 million gallons of the drink and generated $US32.2 million in sales. By the end of 1921 there were more than 1,000 Coca Cola bottling plants across the US and the product was available at almost every soda bar in the country.
Source: Logan Republican, Utah, March 6th 1917. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.
What is less well known is that the phrase E pluribus unum first appeared in Moretum, a lyric poem outlining a recipe for a popular cheese and garlic spread. Moretum was probably written in the 1st century BC and is usually attributed to Virgil or one of his followers.
An English translation of the relevant section is:
“And when he has collected these [ingredients] he comes and sits him down beside the cheerful fire
And loudly for the mortar asks his wench. Then singly each of the garlic heads he strips…
On these he sprinkles grains of salt, and cheese is added, hard from taking up the salt.
The aforesaid herbs he now does introduce, and with his left hand beneath his hairy groin
Supports his garment; with his right he first breaks the reeking garlic with the pestle
Then everything he equally does rub in the mingled juice. His hand in circles move
Till by degrees they one by one do lose their proper powers
And out of many comes one single colour, not entirely green.”
Source: Appendix Vergiliana, c.20BC. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.
Ebenezer Parkman was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1703. Parkman would spent most of his adult life as the reverend in Westborough, Worcester County. In the summer of 1752 he was struck down by an undiagnosed fever, a disease which had already claimed several lives in the district. Bedridden for weeks and unable to eat, Parkman continued to weaken, while concerned family members kept a constant vigil at his bedside. In late August Parkman’s fever started to dissipate. He found enough strength to write in his diary – and to report the reason for his recovery:
“My wife tends me [at] nights and supplies me with breast milky.”
Parkman’s wife Mary sent their one-year-old son Samuel to relatives, so that she could nurse her ailing husband. Parkman Senior recovered fully and lived another 30 years, dying in December 1782.
Source: Francis Wallett (ed.) The Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, 1703-1782. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.
Source: The Ann Arbour Argus, December 28th 1894. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.
“Letters from Boston complain much of the taste of their fish being altered. Four or five hundred chests of tea may have so contaminated the water in the Harbour that the fish may have contracted a disorder, not unlike the nervous complaints of the human Body. Should this complaint extend itself as far as the banks of Newfoundland, our Spanish and Portugal fish trade may be much affected by it.”
Source: The Virginia Gazette, May 5th 1774. Content on this page is © Alpha History 2019-23. Content may not be republished without our express permission. For more information please refer to our Terms of Use or contact Alpha History.