A Quick Bit: The US Mint

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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A Quick Bit: The US Mint

On June 10, 1652, at only 28 years old, Massachusetts silversmith John Hull opened the first mint in America in defiance of English colonial law. The first coin issued was the Pine Tree Shilling, designed by Hull.

This mint produced coins from 1652 to 1682. As compensation, Hull was allowed to keep 6 percent of all the silver he minted, which was a substantial percentage.

In recognition of this day in history, we’ve compiled a few related books you might find interesting.

The United States Mint in Philadelphia by Joshua McMorrow-Hernandez

Following calls by Alexander Hamilton and other Founding Fathers for the nation to issue its own money, Congress passed legislation to officially establish the United States Mint in 1792. Growing from its humble beginnings as a collection of small buildings in the nation’s onetime capital city of Philadelphia, the United States Mint now stands along Independence National Historical Park as the largest coin factory in the world. While the Philadelphia Mint is one of several official United States coin manufacturing facilities, it remains the heart of coining operations in the nation and is also one of the most popular attractions in “The City of Brotherly Love.” You can find this book here!

Related: Philadelphia Soul – Spiritual Values in the City of Brotherly Love

Forgotten Colorado Silver: Joseph Lesher’s Defiant Coins by Robert D. Leonard Jr., Ken Hallenbeck, Adna G. Wilde Jr.

At the turn of the last century, miner Joseph Lesher attempted to raise the price of silver by privately minting octagonal “Referendum souvenir medal” coins with values of $1.25 or $1. They were common in Victor, Cripple Creek, Denver and other places in Colorado in the days after William Jennings Bryan fought unsuccessfully for free silver. Surviving an initial dust-up with the Secret Service, Lesher found a loophole to place them in circulation in 1900 and 1901. Today, coin collectors pay more than $1,000 for one. This is the story of Joseph Lesher and his audacious private mint, along with the merchants in the mining towns and elsewhere who supported him. You can find this book here!

The Land Before Fort Know by Gary Kempf

Known as the home of Mounted Warfare, Fort Knox is also the location of the U.S. Treasury Department Gold Vault that opened in February 1937. Fort Knox covers 178 square miles and spans parts of Hardin, Meade, and Bullitt Counties. The area was once home to Thomas Lincoln, father of the nation’s martyred 16th president, as well as the burial place of Abraham Lincoln’s grandmother, Bathsheba Lincoln. Images of America: The Land Before Fort Knox illuminates the past while images bring to light people and places of yesterday. You can find this book here!

The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry: Tigers Vs. Bulldogs

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry: Tigers Vs. Bulldogs

American history is stuffed with feuds, grudge matches, and vendettas. Among the more friendly (and less bloody) are found in American sports, college football specifically. And in the Deep South, the oldest and most colorful rivalry is between Auburn University and University of Georgia. 

1892

The deep south’s oldest rivalry stretches back to the nineteenth century, where, in 1892, Auburn (then known as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama) met University of Georgia in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. Three thousand fans arrived by train, carriage, buggy and horseback for the afternoon kickoff. Georgia Tech, without its own football team, sent students from the Atlanta school wearing UGA colors as a form of state pride. The match was the brainchild of Dr. Charles Herty and Dr. George Petrie who had witnessed football’s popularity when both were at Johns Hopkins University. Auburn scored all ten of the game’s points in the second half. Georgia fans were so humiliated that they barbecued their own mascot, the goat named Sir William. And a rivalry was born.


“One hundred and fifty students from the technological school are on their way to the grounds on foot. Every one of them wears the crimson and black of Athens. They are carrying cowbells.” — The Atlanta Journal

Monk Gafford (25) runs past Georgia’s defense in 1942. Auburn University Library Special Collections. Image sourced from The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry: Auburn vs. Georgia.

1942

Upsets have always been the most thrilling things to witness on the gridiron, and 1942 delivered one of the biggest. Even though the hearts and minds of young men were focused on World War II, Georgia was in the middle of its greatest season. Heisman Trophy winner Frank Sinkwich led the Bulldogs to fifteen straight wins and the No. 1 rank. Auburn, however, was showing up with an unremarkable 4-4-1. During the match-up, Auburn limited Georgia to thirty-seven rushing yards, and only twelve of Georgia’s thirty-four passes were completed. Auburn never completed a pass, but compiled 355 rushing yards, beating Georgia, 27-13, and dumbfounding every sports journalist in the country

A Christmas card from Auburn’s athletic department after the Tigers were crowned national champions in 1957. Auburn University Library Special Collections. Image sourced from The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry: Auburn vs. Georgia.

Related: Friday Night Heights: The Best of Texas High School Football

1957

By the time Auburn reached 1957’s annual grudge match, they had a 7-0 record and hadn’t lost to Georgia since 1952. In ten games in 1957, Auburn’s defense never allowed a rushing touchdown. Georgia was playing for former head coach General William Alexander Cunningham, who was critically ill. The Bulldogs almost beat the undefeated Tigers, but Georgia only came within three yards of victory. Auburn was simply unstoppable, going on to a 10-0 record, and winning the national championship.

Tommy Lowry carries the ball against UGA in 1971. Auburn University Library Special Collections. Image sourced from The Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry: Auburn vs. Georgia.

1971

Easily the best match-up between Auburn and Georgia happened in 1971, when both met as undefeated teams, and the loser would be eliminated from SEC title contention. And adding to the stakes, it was the first time since 1920 that both teams met without a loss. Auburn’s quarterback Pat Sullivan passed for 248 yards and four touchdowns, but Georgia quarterback Andy Johnson kept the game close. In the fourth quarter, Georgia got within one point. As Georgia attempted to tie the game at 21, Roger Mitchell blocked the extra point. On Auburn’s first play after receiving the kickoff, Pat Sullivan connected with his receiver who ran seventy yards to the end zone. In the blink of an eye, Auburn was up, 28–20, and didn’t stop there, winning the game, 35–20.

Lynch-Young Memorial Trophy

Since 1954, the Lynch-Young Memorial Trophy was presented to the MVP of the Deep South’s Oldest Rivalry. Check out these winners who would also go on to receive intercollegiate football’s highest honor, the Heisman Trophy: 1971, Pat Sullivan, Auburn. 1982, Herschel Walker, Georgia. 1985, Bo Jackson, Georgia. 2010, Cam Newton, Auburn.

Want to read more about college football rivalries? Check out similar titles below at arcadiapublishing.com!

Hemingway’s Idaho: How the Sun Valley Shaped the Famous Author

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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Hemingway’s Idaho: How the Sun Valley Shaped the Famous Author

In 1939, Ernest Hemingway made his first visit to Idaho’s Sun Valley. “A hell of a lot of state, this Idaho,” he told a companion. The famous author had just finished a pronghorn hunt. Now he was taking in the Sawtooth Valley and the headwaters of the Salmon River. “You’d have to come from a test tube and think like a machine,” Hemingway said, “not to engrave all of this in your head so that you never lose it.”

And that’s the thing: for the remaining twenty-two years of his life, before he committed suicide in 1961, Ernest Hemingway never lost his love for Idaho and its landscape.

Hemingway’s Philosophy Of The Outdoors

An image of vast mountains, trees and sun rays peeking out from the clouds.
Hemingway’s view — the sights from Galena Summit, including the Sawtooth Valley and the headwaters of the Salmon River. Image sourced from Hemingway’s Sun Valley: Local Stories behind his Code, Characters and Crisis.

Hemingway was not an environmentalist, as the term is defined today, for he did not act upon the preservation of wild places much beyond his desire to be able to visit intact ecosystems in which to hunt or fish.

However, Hemingway did have a deep appreciation for the natural world and was a keen observer of nature. He valued nature by developing an appreciation of nature’s beauty, intricacy, and wholeness as therapeutic.

Related: 8 Books For The Literary History Lover

He also valued nature as an arena upon which to project one’s ethical code — something you can see in his wonderful writings. The characters in his stories and novels either demonstrated that they could or could not follow unspoken hunting and fishing codes of conduct, and their actions outdoors revealed much about their inner lives.

Think of Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, relishing the false dawn of morning before blowing up the bridge. Or think of Hemingway himself in Green Hills of Africa, “looking at the thick bush we passed in the dark, feeling the cool wind of the night and smelling the good smell of Africa.”

The Sun Valley’s Special Place

A side profile of Ernest Hemingway crouching with a gun as Bullet the dog runs up behind him
Hemingway hunting near Silver Creek with Sun Valley Resort Lab “Bullet.” Image sourced from Hemingway’s Sun Valley: Local Stories behind his Code, Characters and Crisis.

Hemingway sought out these natural sensations around the world. He fished off Key West and in his beloved Cuba; he skied the backcountry of the European Alps.

But Idaho was a special place for him. He loved the awe-inspiring feeling of participating in the intact ecosystems of wild places, and the Sun Valley offered many such places.

One of the people Hemingway hunted with was Gene Van Guilder, a publicist for the Sun Valley Resort. After Van Guilder died tragically from an accidental gunshot in a canoe, Hemingway wrote his companion’s eulogy.

“He loved the warm sun of summer and the high mountain meadows, the trails through the timber and the sudden clear blue of the lakes,” the author wrote. “He loved the hills in the winter when the snow comes. . . . He loved to shoot, he loved to ride and he loved to fish. Now those are all finished. But the hills remain.”

Hemingway’s End

Ernest Hemingway typing on his typewriter out on a patio
Hemingway at his typewriter while in Sun Valley. Image sourced from Hemingway’s Sun Valley: Local Stories behind his Code, Characters and Crisis.

Hemingway could have been describing his own relationship to nature. But despite his inspiring surroundings, he didn’t do much writing in his last years in Idaho. When he said, during his first visit, that only someone who would “think like a machine” would forget the grandeur, he was being unknowingly prescient.

After all, it was a machine — the electroshock treatment machine used to treat his depression at the Mayo Clinic — that would rob Hemingway of his ability to recall, to think, and, consequently, to write in his final years at Sun Valley.

What to learn more about Hemingway and Sun Valley? Check out Hemingway’s Sun Valley: Local Stories behind his Code, Characters and Crisis and other similar titles at arcadiapublishing.com!

Historical Beauty Hacks & COVID-19 Haircut Hack-Jobs

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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Historical Beauty Hacks & COVID-19 Haircut Hack-Jobs

Due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, barbershops and hair salons have been closed across the country for months now. Because of this, you probably fall into one of these categories:

1.) You’re embracing the color fade & luscious locks!
2.) You’re hating the grown-out look but don’t dare do anything about it.
3.) You’ve done it. You’ve cut your hair at home and you deeply regret it.

For people in the third category, you’re probably embracing not having to see many people right now. Check out these at-home haircut fails if you’re looking for a laugh. 

From your local history publisher, we’re bringing you Historical Beauty Hacks to try in quarantine, or to laugh at (and we’ll match them with a book recommendation).

1. Beer Shampoo

We know this sounds crazy, but it’s a true vintage beauty hack. Rinsing hair with beer is an old wives’ tale that some still swear by today. After the liquid evaporates from the hair, a residue of hops and barley is left giving hair more body and weight. We also think this would make a GREAT conversation starter for the dinner table. (Kidding?) 

If you’re happy about hops, browse our beer history titles to find one local to your area. You can find the titles below here and here.

2. Perfume Your Hairbrush

Women used to spritz their hairbrushes with perfume to carry their signature scent with every hair swish. 

Have you ever spent an hour at a department store getting dizzy with scents? The current crisis puts the future of department stores at risk. Browse our department store titles to find lost, but not forgotten, department stores of the past. You can find the titles below here and here.

3. A Cold Water Classic

This last tip is from Old Hollywood star Joan Crawford. Crawford’s most famous beauty ritual happens to be 100% free: After cleansing, the actress would splash her face 25 times with cold water in order to keep her complexion looking firm and refreshed. 

If you’re intrigued by everything Hollywood, we have some really neat books to recommend. Check out two of our favorites below. You can fine them here and here.

Related: Max Factor: The Father of Modern Makeup

Looking for more historic beauty secrets? Check out some of these similar titles at arcadiapublishing.com!

Edgar Allan Poe And His Life In Charleston, SC

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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Edgar Allan Poe And His Life In Charleston, SC

Edgar Allan Poe ranks as one of the most beloved American authors in all of literature. Many credit him as a macabre master of the Romanticist genre and the Godfather of Goth. While the whole world would eventually embrace Poe, his literary legacy was never a sure thing. In fact, Poe, the author and father of the the detective story genre, crammed a few twists into his professional life before finding immortality in print. And even though New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, and most famously Baltimore all claim ties to the writer, it is Charleston, South Carolina that Poe returns to throughout his short life.

Charleston Stages

After his father David Poe abandoned the family, Edgar and his brother travelled with their mother in a touring theater company. Eliza Poe found steady work on stages in Charleston acting and singing, but nearly four months of working and caring for her children took its toll on the young mother. She fell ill and never recovered, leaving behind a three-year-old Edgar. The tragedy would never fully leave Poe, and would later serve as a recurring theme in his fiction and poems.

Stationed in Charleston

Poe was soon adopted by a family with better prospects than his birth parents could provide. Even though a young Edgar received a decent education, it did little to lessen his emotional anxiety. As a freshman at the University of Virginia, Poe was unprepared and financially strapped. In an attempt to hide from creditors, he enlisted in the army. In Battery H of the First Regiment of the Artillery, Private Poe received orders to sail south to relieve the garrison posted at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston. Poe prospered under the discipline of army life, particularly during his posting at Fort Moultrie. Poe’s restless mind and emotional instability forced him to seek solace elsewhere. During his more than one year at Fort Moultrie, Poe wrote poetry about a star and its connection to theological principles found in the Koran. His Lowcountry inspiration would wait fifteen years to appear in his fiction.

Related: The Fascinating Homes of Edgar Allan Poe

The Editor

Few would claim that Edgar Allan Poe wasn’t a genius. Before his place in literary canon was certified, Poe found solace in solving puzzles. While the thirty-year-old was editing Philadelphia’s Burton’s Gentleman Magazine, he was secretly moonlighting for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger as a puzzle champ who would challenge readers to stump him. His popularity emboldened Poe to strike out on his own with the (unsuccessful) Penn Magazine. Never lasting too long at any publication, Poe seemed to turn a corner, not in another editor’s post, but as a writer of short fiction. In 1833, Poe, hoping to win a $50 prize from Baltimore’s Saturday Visiter, submitted an entire collection of stories. He won, and even though he took a a job at the Southern Literary Messenger, prose would dominate the rest of his professional career.

“Tales of Ratiocination”

It’s easy to see the path from prolific, pulp puzzle-solver to writer of detailed detective tales. Poe’s talent for logical reasoning led him directly to prose. Poe would come to refer to his new work as “tales of ratiocination,” and his crime-solving protagonist C. Auguste Dupin delighted and amazed readers in now-classics “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.” The detective story genre was born.

An original illustration by F.O.C. Darley that accompanied “The Gold-Bug” when Poe’s story was published in Philadelphia’s Saturday Courier in 1843. Darley had signed a contract earlier that year to illustrate Poe’s ultimately unrealized periodical Stylus. Image sourced from Edgar Allan Poe’s Charleston.

Literary Charleston

Poe found great inspiration in Charleston, South Carolina. Widely regarded as generally haunted, bursting with tales of ghosts and pirates, the coastal town is the setting for Poe’s short story “The Gold-Bug.” As serialized in Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper, “The Gold-Bug” is, at its core, a tale of a hunt for pirate treasure along the Carolina coastline, where Poe had visited as a young man and where he was stationed as a soldier, allowing him to paint a romantic picture of the Lowcountry for his readers. Following up with “The Oblong Box” in Godey’s Lady’s Book and the Dollar Newspaper, Poe invited readers to solve the mystery of the contents of an oblong box, where Charleston serves as a port of departure for the tale. Finally, Poe’s “The Balloon Hoax,” much like “The Oblong Box,” included Charleston, with the Lowcountry serving as the story’s destination.

Want to learn more about Poe and Charleston? Check out Edgar Allan Poe’s Charleston and other similar titles at arcadiapublishing.com!

What Do We Know About The Slaves Who Arrived In America In 1619?

Yesterday's America Editorial Team
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What Do We Know About The Slaves Who Arrived In America In 1619?

In 1619 — a date that the New York Times has recently made famous and essential–a group of 32 African men, women, and children arrived on the shores of Virginia. They had been kidnapped in the royal city of Kabasa, Angola, and forced aboard the Spanish slave ship San Juan Bautista. After the ship was attacked by privateers, the captives were taken by the English to their New World colony in Virginia.

This group has been shrouded in mystery and controversy ever since. The white people who enslaved them began the brutal practice that would one day drive the nation apart, and that still shapes so much of American life today. But what do we know about that original group?

Searching For Records

The English people who arrived in 1607 and 1620, in Jamestown and Plymouth Bay, were well documented. Their names were recorded on ship manifests, musters, and census records.

Conversely, when the Angolans left Africa from the time they arrived in English North America, they were destined to be nameless individuals, intended as nothing more than chattel property on the massive agricultural farms of New Spain or Brazil.

When the Angolans came to Virginia, they temporarily disappeared into obscurity. For some, their African birth names are lost to history.

However, the Angolans began to reappear in the colony in the most unusual ways: through the ledgers of the headright system, through subsequent census records, and from legal documents left behind by various county courthouses.

An Invaluable Census

It is from these colonial records, as well as the records of the Virginia Company in England, that we can begin the long and arduous journey of unmasking and preserving their identities and legacies.

In a letter, a colonist named John Rolfe spoke of “20 and Odd” slaves arriving in America. But there’s a better measure — a census known as the Muster of 1620. This census enables us to construct crucial clues as to the men, women, and children who were originally on the San Juan Bautista.

Related: The Mystery of the Sea Islands: Gullah Geechee Legacy

Although this census does not provide the names of any of the Angolans, it does serve as the basis going forward to measure their relative numbers in the colony. It lists 892 Europeans, four Indigenous Americans, and 32 Angolans — 15 men and 17 women.

The population was categorized as either Christian (meaning white) or non-Christian (meaning non-white).

Going Deeper

In that same letter, John Rolfe explained that George Yeardley, the British Governor of Virginia, and his associate Abraham Piersey had taken many of the Angolans to their plantations. For example, Yeardley kept six slaves at his thousand-plus-acre plantation, Flowerdew, plus another two at his town home in Jamestown.

Yeardley and Piersey clearly saw their political positions as a way to achieve personal gain. They needed workers on their plantations, and they enthusiastically enslaved the Angolans and kept them for themselves. To these men, the Angolans were not human beings but economic resources.

But those colonial records sometimes preserve the slaves’ names. They were human beings, with names like John Geaween, Juan Pedro, Antonio Johnson, and Maria Johnson, to mention just a handful of those few dozen Angolans–the people who were captured and brought to America as its first set of slaves.

Eager to learn more? Check out Arrival of the First Africans in Virginia and other similar titles below at arcadiapublishing.com!

Eager to learn more? Check out Arrival of the First Africans in Virginia and other similar titles below at arcadiapublishing.com!

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