Word: 1840s
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...decent thumbnail sketch of the past decade, sure--but also, as I was repeatedly flabbergasted to discover while researching my new novel, which takes place from 1848 to 1850, a perfectly accurate reckoning of the late 1840s as well. And while it's an excellent parlor game to point out the resonant particulars--history really does rhyme, if not repeat itself--I've also become sincerely convinced that that mid--19th century moment is, more than any other, when modern American life really began. The future--that is, our present--came into sight. The way we live...
Even so, Snow's map, says Johnson, "was a transformative moment in the history of cities." And it was a remarkable success for "consilient" thinking, a philosophy formulated in the 1840s in which a cohesive theory from one discipline is used to inform ideas from another. Snow's work on administering ether as an anesthetic convinced him cholera was ingested, not inhaled. As a physician he understood how disease spread through a body. As a resident of Soho, he had the local knowledge to realize that the contagion radiated from a single source. "When you look at cholera...
...Christmas card and its wicked counterpart—the holiday newsletter—both have a long history. A product of the Victorian period, our current Christmas cards first came into vogue in 1840s England. From the very beginning, they often included a newsletter. The entire Victorian project of keeping up appearances and maintaining a veneer of respectability made it inevitable that this newsletter was a heavily amended summary of the events of the year, of course interspersed with all of the proper holiday pleasantries...
...named Louis Prang. Often dubbed the "father of the American Christmas card," Prang started manufacturing cards for the American market in 1875. The practice of exchanging greeting cards with holiday newsletters during Christmas time quickly became popular, as it remains so to this day. While as early as the 1840s some Americans were already sending out cards, the custom grew greatly with Prang’s efforts...
Living small is hardly a new concept. Henry Thoreau tucked himself into a 150-sq.-ft. house on Walden Pond in the 1840s, and the city of San Francisco built some 5,600 earthquake cottages for survivors of the 1906 temblor. But over the past decade, dozens of architects and builders have begun specializing in tiny-house designs. And home buyers--motivated by the desire to simplify their lives, use fewer resources and save money--are falling in love with the little things. Gregory Johnson, a co-founder of the Small House Society in Iowa City, Iowa, estimates that anywhere...