Ice Boxes vs. Refrigerators

Jonathan Rees

I’ve written previously here about the good and bad sides of suddenly being able to access the world’s biggest libraries through Google Books when you have a research project that you’d like to finish someday. Another Google experiment that debuted while I was working on Refrigeration Nation was Google Ngrams.

Ngrams, if you don’t know about them, chart the frequency of words or phrases as they appeared in volumes scanned by the Google Books project against the years that those books were published. (See Eric Schultz's post from last month.) Yes, it is incredibly easy to lose several hours playing with this research tool. Luckily for me, I already knew what I wanted to chart as soon as I heard of it:

CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

That is the chart for “ice box” vs. “refrigerator.” (For what it’s worth, icebox [one word] looks almost identical.) What I really appreciate about that chart is that it basically illustrates something that my research already told me: before the electric household refrigerator came along, “ice boxes” were called “refrigerators.” Before explaining that statement a little better, let me define terms. While often used interchangeably with the word “refrigerator” by people over sixty, an ice box in the historical sense refers to a box with ice in it designed to keep perishable food fresh. The first ice boxes were made by carpenters in the 1840s, designed to take advantage of something new in American life: the regular household delivery of large blocks of ice that could be obtained daily in large cities and even small ones. Now, instead of going to market every day for your vegetables or fresh meats, consumers could buy for more than one day of meals at once, and keep the extra food in their ice box.

Umbrella Man

Edward H. Miller

At 12:30 PM on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas—just as Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots into the presidential limousine—Louis Steven Witt stood on the sidewalk of Elm Street as the presidential motorcade passed. Witt was doing something that many of us would consider peculiar. He carried a large black umbrella opened widely as the sun shined brightly in the Texas sky. In Abraham

Umbrella Man at far left of photo.

Zapruder’s famous twenty-six second film that captured the assassination, Witt’s umbrella can be seen just as the limousine, having briefly been obstructed by a freeway sign, reappears and President Kennedy suddenly grasps for his throat. In the years following the tragedy, assassination theorists produced several outlandish accounts of what Witt—the Umbrella Man, as they named him—was actually doing. Some posited that Witt was a signalman for the supposedly numerous gunmen in Dealey Plaza that day. Another equally preposterous explanation was that the umbrella itself fired a dart, rendering the president frozen for the kill shot. Witt’s umbrella actually exemplified a common form of protest by the far Right, which was strong in Dallas in the 1950s and 1960s. The umbrella was meant to disparage any policy that involved compromise by invoking the memory of England’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (who always carried an umbrella) and the failed policy of appeasement that he championed against Hitler at the Munich Conference in 1938.[1]

Fighting the Mob, Welcoming Mobs

Michael S. Green

Today thousands of Las Vegans and tourists will line up to go to a museum, thanks to Senator Estes

Frank Costello testifying before the Kefauver Committee, 1951.

Kefauver of Tennessee; a mayor who used to represent mobsters; and federal officials who proved more Las Vegan than Las Vegans.

The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, known as the Mob Museum, opened in Las Vegas on February 14, 2012, on a carefully chosen date: the anniversary of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In 1929, in Chicago, Al Capone’s hoodlums executed several members of the gangs led by Scarface’s rival, Bugs Moran. The museum has the wall, complete with bullet holes and bloodstains.

Las Vegas seems like a logical place for this museum, since casino operators associated with the mob built and ran many of the resorts that dotted the Strip from the 1940s into the 1980s. Many continue to think it all began with Bugsy Siegel—or perhaps Warren Beatty—opening the Flamingo in 1946. Although the idea was somebody else’s, Siegel took over the construction and proved to be a lousy businessman, and he died before his dream had become a profit center for his mob-associated investors.

Went With The Wind!

Heather Cox Richardson

In honor of the birthday of Margaret Mitchell (November 8, 1900), I’d like to offer the very best thing to come out of Gone With the Wind: Carol Burnett’s classic spoof, entitled “Went With the Wind.” I discovered yesterday that none of my students had heard of this, and Burnett as Scarlett O’Hara in her new dress (at the beginning of Part 2) is one of the all-time greatest moments in comedic history:

Part 1:

Part 2:

A Tense October

Heather Cox Richardson

United States Department of Defense graphic in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted for thirteen tense days in October 1962. During those days, the USSR faced off against the U.S. over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy vowed not to permit missiles so close to America; Premier Krushchev vowed to put them in Cuba
anyway. The two week standoff was the closest the Cold War ever came to erupting into a hot war.

And with nuclear weapons widespread, it would have been a hot war, indeed.

The J.F.K. Library has put together a website that enables a viewer to experience each day of that crisis.

Soccer: An American Sport

Brian D. Bunk

Chicago, 1905. SDN-004085, Chicago Daily News negatives collection, Chicago History Museum.

One sure way to irritate historians of soccer in the United States (and yes, there are a few) is to call the sport foreign. In various forms the game has been played by Native Americans and Puritans; factory workers and college students; and professionals and preschoolers throughout American history. Why then does this idea persist? The reasons are complex, but one important factor is that the mainstream sporting press, especially in the second half of the 20th century, has continually depicted soccer as a foreign game.