Category: Learn History Through Fiction

From 1900 to WWI, 4 million Italians, most from southern rural areas, emigrated to America to escape poverty and sickness (pellagra, cholera). The Commissariat of Emigration, created in 1901, helped them at the point of embarkation and after they arrived, including dealing with U.S. labor laws that discriminated against alien workers. Immigrants sent money home, accounting for as much as 5% of Italy’s economy. Read more about Italian-Americans in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

The Spirit of St. Louis, the custom M-1 monoplane that Charles Lindbergh flew on his 1927 cross-Atlantic solo flight, was built in San Diego, California by Ryan Airlines. On May 10, Lindbergh flew 4 hours overnight from Rockwell Field on North Island in San Diego to Lambert Field, St. Louis, Missouri. His historic flight from New York to Paris happened May 20-21. Discover more San Diego history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

At midnight on 12/31/1914, President Woodrow Wilson pressed a Western Union telegraph key in Washington, D.C. which turned on the lights and touched off a display of fireworks to open the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego’s Balboa Park. Crowds surged across Cabrillo Bridge to see the exhibits and the park’s Spanish Colonial architecture. Discover more San Diego history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

In the early 20th century, the Chicago meat-packing industry used immigrant labor, especially from Eastern Europe. Working conditions and sanitary practices were scandalously bad, as revealed in the Upton Sinclair political novel, The Jungle, published on February 26, 1906. Later that year, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act on the same day, June 30, 1906. Read more Chicago and labor history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

In the spring of 1903, flooding on the Kansas River inundated North Topeka, an industrial section with flour mills and lumber yards that lies in a valley. Hundreds were marooned in their homes and 29 drowned. There was high water again in 1908, 1923, and 1935 but the dikes constructed after 1903 flood held. Read more Topeka and Kansas history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

San Diego Zoo, conceived by Dr. Harry Wegeforth, grew from the abandoned exotic animal exhibits after the 1915 Panama-California Exposition. A permanent tract of land in Balboa Park was set aside and the zoo opened in 1922. In addition to animals from the Exposition, the zoo acquired a menagerie from the defunct Wonderland Amusement Park. Publication of ZooNooz began in 1925. Belle Benchley, director from 1925-1953, was the only woman in the world to serve in this role. San Diego also was the first “cageless” zoo with moats surrounding the exhibits. Its outdoor avian house boasted the world’s largest bird cage. Discover more San Diego history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

The site of the Triangle Waist Company fire (March 25, 1911) is a national historic landmark in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Originally named the Asch Building, now the Brown Building, the ten-story terra cotta structure lies just east of Washington Square Park on the campus of New York University. The fire, on the 8th to 10th floor where the factory was located, killed 146 people, mostly women, Jewish and Italian immigrants. Read about one survivor of the Triangle Waist Company fire in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

BIBLIOTHERAPY is the practice, dating back to the Ancient Greeks, of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect. After the First World War, traumatized (“shell-shocked”) soldiers returning home were often prescribed a course of reading to help them readjust to civilian life. In the U.S., the American Library Association distributed a list of recommended books while the novels of Jane Austen were advised in the U.K. Today, research on “mirror neurons” in the brain shows that reading literary fiction (but not popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improves empathy, i.e., the ability to experience what others go through as if you had gone through it yourself. Learn more about bibliotherapy in an article at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/can-reading-make-you-happier. To find a book for what ails you, check out The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies (Berthoud & Elderkin, 2016). See what literary novels were popular in the years ending and after the Great War in BEHIND THE STORY. Read more about traumatized WWI veterans in On the Shore (see NOVELS). What novels would you recommend for our shell-shocked country today?

In honor of Women’s History Month (March) – World War One boosted the cause of women’s suffrage when they were employed to replace the men fighting overseas. Women worked in the “land army” (farming), munitions factories, public transport, local law enforcement, and the postal service. By war’s end, women were also recruited into the armed forces as cooks, clerks, telephone operators, electricians, and code experts. These vital roles increased their economic, social, and political power. Parades and rallies enhanced their visibility. Using the rhetoric of the progressive era to demand the right of self-government, the suffrage movement pressured a reluctant President Woodrow Wilson in 1918 to approve a constitutional change and in 1920 the 19th amendment nationalized women’s right to vote. Read more about women’s involvement in the suffrage and labor movements during this era in On the Shore (see NOVELS).