A DUCK OF A WIFE Litchfield CT April 7, 1859             A duck of a wife, whose husband went for a day or two on a bit of a lark, thus advertises him:             LOST, STRAYED OR STOLEN—An individual whom I, in an unguarded moment of loneliness, was thoughtless enough to adopt as my husband. He is a good looking and feeble individual, knowing enough to go in when it rains, unless some good looking girl offers her umbrella. Answers to the name of John. Was last seen in the company of Julia Harris, walking, his arm around her waist, up the plank road, looking more like a fool, if possible, than ever. Anybody who will catch the poor fellow and bring him carefully back so that I can chastise him for running away, will be asked to stay for tea. —HENRIETTA A. SMITH A Runaway Woman? RUNAWAY WIVES AND RAILROADS Jan 14, 1860 NY Times    ...

  We Were Warned A Long Time Ago             In 1856,  an American woman,  Mrs. Eunice Foote,  performed a series of experiments demonstrating that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere would significantly raise the temperature of the climate. Moreover, she showed it would be very slow to cool back to normal--much slower than unpolluted air. The results were published in a scientific journal in November 1856.          Of course she could not be admitted to the professional scientific organizations. No women were allowed. On the other hand, she was married to a respected judge and inventor. And her paper was only 557 words long, about the length of a short news story or slightly longer than usual letter to the editor.          Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays: By Eunice Foote From the American Journal of Science and Arts   Nov 1856 Pages 382, ...

  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...

(This is the first in a four part series)            If America's richest man married the most beautiful and talented actress in the English speaking world--and then she went to work in his warehouse or auto factory for four months and wrote a blistering report about conditions under which workers labored...      Well, that's happened before.      Pearce Mease Butler  had it all—and then some.  Handsome, well educated, charming, and very, very, very rich.   Pearce Mease Butler      His grandfather and namesake had been a British Officer who resigned his commission and settled in South Carolina in 1771 and soon built a fortune by the time of the Revolution.  Major Butler joined the Patriot cause.  An able soldier and distinguished politician, he was one of South Carolina’s representatives to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence and later wrote ...

  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...