~openculture | Bookmarks (3)

Six months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia, and asked What Is Your Life’s Blueprint? Addressing the students, he observed: “This is the most important and crucial period of your lives. For what you do now and what you decide now at this age […]

Step right up, folks! Shoot the Chutes! Thrill to the Fire and Flames show! Ride an elephant! See the Bearded Lady! Early in the 20th century, crowds flocked to New York City’s Coney Island, where wonders awaited at every turn. In 1902, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle published a few of the highlights in store for […]

However detailed they may be in other respects, many accounts of daily life centuries and centuries ago pass over the use of the toilet in silence. Even if they didn’t, they wouldn’t involve the kind of toilets we would recognize today, but rather chamber pots, outhouses, and other kinds of specialized rooms with chutes emptying […]