African Americans in the CT National Guard, 1870 to 1919
An item titled “Race Feeling at Manassas” in the New Haven Daily Morning Journal and Courier of September 6, 1904 should alert historians to the fact that the story of the Black...
Category: History Blogs
Connecticut African Americans Found the Sumner League, August 1894
On August 22, 1894, around 200 Connecticut African American leaders met at the famous Savin Rock establishment of the caterer J. W. Stewart and formed a new organization for the “betterment of the conditions...
Connecticut National Guard at Pine Camp N.Y., 1908
Every summer, National Guard units all across the US have two weeks of field training at a military reservation, located, typically, in their home state. The Connecticut National Guard (CNG) trains at the...
The “Hello Girls”
It was the District Telephone Company of New Haven (later Southern New England Telephone) that established the first commercial telephone exchange in the nation in 1878. Thirty years later, the Morning Journal-Courier of...
A Memorial Day Thought by the Optimist, May 29, 1916
On Memorial Day one hundred years ago today, the Howland Dry Goods Co. of Bridgeport chose to use their advertising space in the Bridgeport Evening Farmer to publish this commentary on the Great War...
“Convention in Riot”
“Football Tactics Adopted by Tennesseans to Gain Rostrum,” The Morning Journal-Courier, March 26, 1908 The Connecticut Digital Newspaper Project is preparing to scan The Morning Journal-Courier (New Haven, Conn.) from 1887 through 1908. The...
Combinations and the Commerce Commission: the Billard Affair Makes the Headlines, 1914
The New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad was made very vulnerable by a series of highly publicized train accidents that tarnished its reputation in the public mind. In 1913 alone, 198 employees and...
International Women’s Day, 2016
When Brewers Posed as Farmers to Defeat Woman Suffrage The use of populist posturing to win votes is much discussed in the blogosphere this electoral season. In 1915, a populist campaign designed not to...
Black History Month, February, 2016
The Norwich African American Community Takes on “The Clansman,” 1909 Last week, a brand new Sundance film called “The Birth of a Nation” made the news when a distributor paid a cool $17.5 million...
The Joan of Arc of Shelton, the Efficiency Man, the O’Brien’s, and Sidney Blumenthal
On January 3, 1914, three hundred men and women who were on strike at the Shelton mill of Sidney Blumenthal marched in a solemn funeral procession from the “Cement House,” up the Fourth Street...