January 26, 2010

San Francisco - Market Street - 1905

This video is too splendid not to share. It is a leisurely cruise down Market Street in 1905, a year before the earthquake destroyed it all. Look for the wonderful interplay of streetcars, horse carts, carriages, automobiles and pedestrians - especially the kids playing dodge-the-streetcar and hanging on the back of an automobile. Having grown up in the Bay Area, I also loved the sense of familiar but different I got seeing this street I have visited countless times.

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Posted by Walter at 07:15 AM

January 09, 2010

Help Wanted - Quacks, Mountebanks, Frauds & Flim-Flam Men

The Pasadena Museum of History has asked me to work with them putting together programs in the coming year. One of the ideas we floated was a program devoted to bizarre popular pseudo-science of the early 20th Century.

I, for example, have a schtick as a phrenologist. However, we could certainly use people like a magnetic healer, a patent medicine huckster, a spiritualist, an elctrotherapist, a specialist in "female complaints" or anything else you can think of that would be historically appropriate, interesting and shed light on popular conceptions and misconceptions about science in the early 20th Century. There would even be room for people who want to present valid science and technology of the day.

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Posted by Walter at 04:28 PM | Comments (1)