Word: 1850s
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Other items of interest in the assortment are playbills of the 1850s advertising for "respectable young men to act as auxiliaries," stage directions for the audience advising theatre-goers to greet the play with "shouts of applause" and "appropriate outbursts of mirth," and exhortations to actresses saying with all the correctness of an English Aa student, "Ladies, if you smoke do so in private-as we do not want...
...plaintive ballad about the man who dared ask a wartime waiter for one meat ball is fast becoming a fad with U.S. bobby-soxers. The adolescents have no idea how old-fashioned they are: their latest musical hero was well known to Boston in the 1850s. Almost a century ago, a shy Harvard Latin professor named George Martin Lane tried to buy a single fish ball in a restaurant, heard his piddling order bellowed out by a surly waiter...
...1850s spiritualism swept the U.S. eastern seaboard like a fog. It seemed, said one flabbergasted convert, "as though the spirit world, having at last hit upon a means of communicating with ours, could not get enough of it." Mediums sprang to fame, set the ether vibrating with spirit music, spirit painting, voices, lights, icy currents of air, luminous faces, words written in fire. "A whole mine of mysticism hatching beneath the skepticism of the 19th Century," said the shrewd French Diarists Edmond and Jules Goncourt...
...river itself: Steamboat Gothic. Best example was a fine old mansion, "Hill-Forest," which stands on the muddy Ohio's banks near Aurora, Ind. (see cut). With circular tower and porches, wrought-iron balustrades, Steamboat Gothic represented the last word in elegance to riverboat captains of the 1850s, is one of the most elaborate forms of U.S. architecture ever built of wood...
...opera which Manager Edward Johnson chose for the opener was a new show, and as queer as they come. Un Ballo in Maschera (Masked Ball) was written by Giuseppe Verdi in the 1850s to a play by Scribe which dealt with the assassination of Sweden's King Gustavus III. Because of trouble nearly a century ago with Italian censors, the libretto of Masked Ball was given a U. S. background. Its hero was "Riccardo, Count of Warwick, Governor of Boston" in the 17th Century. He tenoriously fell in love with the soprano wife of his "Creole" secretary. After everyone...