In October 1903, the Weather Forecast Company of St. Paul, Minnesota, printed a testimonial from the editor of the St. Paul Dispatch endorsing the company’s predictions as “an unqualified success” and the newspaper’s most popular feature.[1] The Dispatch, which claimed to be the only newspaper west of the Atlantic coast to have its own commercial weather service, introduced the forecasts in 1903 especially for farmers in “the greatest crop region in the world.”
On Nippers, Nipper-Napping, and the New York Public Library
In the weeks that followed, Nipper and I worked together—I poring over phonograph industry periodicals and he at projecting his trademark canine bemusement. I occasionally glanced up from my copies of Phonoscope or Voice of the Victor to meditate on my colleague’s recent brush with disaster. How had the statue come to be in the lobby of the Library? And how had it accrued value (or agency?) such that someone would risk their safety and good name to steal it? This business of Nipper-napping, I determined, was a strange enterprise indeed, and one worth trying to understand.
Bedeviled Reconciliation: Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War
Civil War Era, for example, analysis of popular literature from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s incendiary Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) to Jefferson Davis’ turgid The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) reveals the conflicting ways Americans recorded their experiences of the secession crisis, war, and the uncertain peace that followed. Moreover, popular literature can also create history, as with Thomas F. Dixon’s novel, The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), which played a central role in shaping post-Civil War culture of the United States.