Category: Learn History Through Fiction

The Anglesey, Wales village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll (Llanfairpwll for short) is world famous for having Britain’s longest place name. Less well know is that it’s where the first Women’s Institute (WI) in Britain was founded. The movement started in Canada in 1897. In 1913, Mrs. Alfred Watt, who had worked at the WI headquarters in Canada came to London and tried, without success, to start WI’s in the south of England. Two years later, when Britain was looking to boost food preservation during WW I, she received the enthusiastic support of Colonel Stapleton Cotton from Llanfairpwll and the first official British WI was founded there in September 1915. Read a fictionalized account of the origins of WI’s in the story “Jamming” (see STORIES) and discover more interesting history in BEHIND THE STORY.

The traditional watch rotation in the Navy is called “five and dime.” Sailors serve five hours on watch, followed by ten hours off. However, during those ten hours, they often have other duties, so it’s not uncommon to work a 20-hour day. The result is sleep deprivation, which in turn leads to accidents, such as the recent ones that claimed many sailors’ lives. Some ships are now changing to a “three and nine” watch schedule. Read more about the traditional Navy in WWI in On the Shore (NOVELS) and the dangers of “five and dime” in BEHIND THE STORY.

Part Two of On the Shore (see NOVELS) opens with Dev Levinson, age 12, getting her period for the first time. Researching the book’s era (1917-1925), I discovered that Lister’s Towels were the first feminine sanitary pads, manufactured in 1896 by Johnson & Johnson. Kotex was launched in 1920 by Kimberly-Clark to make use of leftover cellucotton (wood pulp fiber) from World War One bandages. Before commercial sanitary pads were available, women wore and washed rags, which is where the expression “on the rag” comes from. Read more in BEHIND THE STORY.

August 26 is Women’s Equality Day, celebrating passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 granting women the right to vote. Suffrage is an ongoing theme for the two generations of women in On the Shore, which ends in 1925. On January 5, 1925 Nellie Taylor Ross of Wyoming became the first female governor in the U.S. Read more about the role of women during this era in On the Shore (see NOVELS).

The novel I’m writing now begins with an uncanny display described in my short story “Shoot the Chute” (Saranac Review, Fall 2017). From 1903 to the 1940s, premature babies in incubators were part of the carnival show at Coney Island, next to Violetta the Armless Legless Wonder, Princess WeeWee, and Ajax the Sword-Swallower. Entry cost a quarter and people flocked to see them. Read more about “Shoot the Shoot” in SHORT STORIES and about incubator babies (including the smallest one who lived) in BEHIND THE STORY.

While writing my novel A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (Alternative Book Press, 2018 in press), I discovered that Henry Ford employed midgets to work in the Willow Run (Michigan) B-24 Bomber Plant during the Second World War because they were small enough to crawl inside the wings and buck rivets from the inside. Midgets were paid less than full-size men but more than Rosie the Riveter. Read more about the book in NOVELS and about a “special doorknob” in BEHIND THE STORY.

Prohibition features in my story “Blood and Sand” (see STORIES) as well as in a coming-of-age scene in my novel On the Shore (see NOVELS). The Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition), banning the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor, became law in 1920, but many large cities and states were already dry by 1918. Bootlegging grew into a vast illegal empire. Corruption among enforcement agents (with bribes as high as $300,000 a month) was so prevalent that President Warren G. Harding complained about it in his 1922 State of the Union address. Yet Harding kept the White House well stocked with bootleg liquor. Read more about the days of Prohibition in BEHIND THE STORY.

Two of my NOVELS (On the Shore and A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve.) feature WW I veterans. While researching the books, I was horrified to read about the immediate and lasting effects of mustard gas. The gas is so named because its color and odor resemble mustard. It causes large blisters on the skin or lungs, which fill with yellow-brown liquid, and swells the eyelids, resulting in temporary blindness; The gas vaporizes easily, penetrating clothing even in areas not directly exposed. Mustard gas can also damage DNA and decrease the formation of red blood cells in bone marrow, causing aplastic anemia, the same condition caused by radiation poisoning. Read more about both books and the WW I characters affected in NOVELS. Learn more interesting history in BEHIND THE STORY.

Glow-in-the-dark watches worn by WW I soldiers in the trenches were the rage in the post-war years. U.S. Radium Corporation, a major defense contractor in Orange, NJ, marketed the luminous paint under the brand name “Undark. ” After the war, they hired 70 young women to paint watch dials for popular consumption. Although they knew the radium, the company told workers it was harmless. The women mixed glue, water, and powder made of radium and zinc oxide, then used camel hair brushes to apply paint onto the dial numbers. The brushes lost their shape after a few strokes so supervisors encouraged the women to point the tips with their lips or tongues to keep them sharp. After 3-5 years, the women began to suffer from anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw. Known as the “radium girls” in lawsuits, many subsequently died. See “Undark” (winner of the Walter Sullivan Prize) in STORIES to learn more about this tragedy. Also check out BEHIND THE STORY for corollary information on this era.

 

Discovered while researching the story “Felines at Fault” – In the 1910s and 1920s, cats became pets instead of just mousers. An uptick in the number of house cats was accompanied by an increase in the number of divorces. Back then, couples had to prove a valid reason for dissolving their marriage. Cats often provided the excuse, with husbands claiming abandonment over their wives affection for their cats, or wives angered by their husband’s mistreatment of the animals. After no-fault divorce laws went into effect (late 1960s), the number of cat-related divorces declined. One suspects there was more to these marital spats than feline infelicity. Read more in BEHIND THE STORY.