William & Kate!   Harry & Meghan! Charles & Diana! Vicky & Al! Fred & Vicky! Bertie & Alexandra! American newspapers and magazines have long devoted large chunks of their publications to the adventurous and romantic goings on of the British Royal family. It certainly didn’t start with William and Kate or Charles and Diana. Prince Albert and Queen Victoria wedding day "...marry as a woman, not as a queen." A few weeks after her 18 th birthday, Victoria became queen of England in 1837, just at the dawn of mass media. After more than a century of stodgy German kings, there was finally a beautiful young, unmarried princess, one that  fit the fairy tales.   Her prince, literally, was Prince Albert, of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, one of the very numerous independent dukedoms, principalities in the area known by the geographic catch-all term, Germany.    The couple was good looking and in love.   The young queen had designed her own...

  Victoria Woodhull as drawn by Thomas Nast, America's first political cartoonist.  Woodhull ran for president in 1872 on a platform we would call women's rights, or human rights.  The virtuous young woman in the background bending under the burden of children and a drunkard husband is saying, "I 'd rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your Fornication."         “Do you think your generation invented sex?” my 80 year old grandmother asked when I was in my twenties.  I nearly ran her Oldsmobile off the road.  At the time I was sure I had seen undiscovered vistas with the enthusiastic co operation of fellow explorers.  Much older now, I realize my grandparents did not invent sex in the 1920s either.       Whoever invented it—and there have been a number of claimants—“free love” or “open marriage,” communes have blessed modern Americans with microwaves and table settings .    ...

  "Socialism in Arkansas"  1858         As you can read in the two excerpts from newspapers below, socialism was once acceptable in Arkansas as long as it did not promote abolitionists and "...other isms, germinating in the north."           Utopian communities of all sorts were promoted in  the twenty years before the Civil War and the two decades following.  The most enduring of these was the Amana group in Iowa, founded in 1840.  Amana morphed from an agricultural commune into a manufacturing commune. Eventually, it was sold to corporate America and endures today as a brand of microwaves sold in the US.         Over the next several weeks, I'll take a look at some of the more interesting and/or exemplary specimens  of ante bellum utopians.            There were "free love" communities with varying definitions of "free love." Most of the defi...

            New York City, 1854 courtesy of NY Historical Society         Elizabeth Jennings and Sarah Adams just wanted to get to church on time, not start a civil rights case. Elizabeth was organist and head of the music program at First African Congregational Church in New York City.      Record breaking heat blanketed the city of around a half million. Horses, dogs, and hogs had died in greater numbers than usual from heatstroke.  As usual, the city was slow to remove animal carcasses from public streets. Too, two hundred tons of horse manure a day was deposited by the 22,000+ horses pulling wagons and carriages in the city.      Elizabeth and Sarah were running late July 16, 1854. A two mile walk through heat and what must have been an awful stench, was not appealing.  Wearing inch and half heel boots and "pages" --loops of rope sewn into and around their skirts us...