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.”
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.