No. 850
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
February 10, 2026

Horses and Pavements.

New York City Enormities - The Broken Leg on Broadway.
February 10, 2026
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Via Newspapers.comCalvin is among the literary cats who have been immortalized in prose.  Originally part of the household of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Calvin eventually made his home with author Charles Dudley Warner.  After the cat died, Warner wrote the following biographical essay, which was often republished in various late 19th century newspapers and periodicals.  This
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Strange Company - 9/9/2026
  [Editor’s note: Guest writer, Peter Dickson, lives in West Sussex, England and has been working with microfilm copies of The Duncan Campbell Papers from the State Library of NSW, Sydney, Australia. The following are some of his analyses of what he has discovered from reading these papers. Dickson has contributed many transcriptions to the Jamaica […]
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
"As his son I am proud of hisefforts to succeed in life"Jefferson Randolph Smith IIIArtifact #93-2Jeff Smith collection(Click image to enlarge) oapy's son hires a legal firm to stop the defamation of his father's name. At age 30, Jefferson Randolph Smith III, Soapy and Mary's oldest son, was protecting his father's legacy and his mother's reputation from "libel" and scandal. He was also
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 10/13/2025
Sadie and Clarence.In April 1894, the murder of Montgomery Gibbs, a successful attorney, caused great excitement in Buffalo, New York. He was found shot to death in a driveway on Delaware Avenue with no clues to the killer’s identity. The police and newspapers investigated the crime, but they had no solid leads, and it remained unsolved. Then, in October, they received a tip that Clarence
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Murder By Gaslight - 9/5/2026
Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad. November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately … Continue reading
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Executed Today - 11/13/2020
Their Sex's Worst Foes. | Song of the Great Blizzard.

Horses and Pavements.

Enormites

New York City Enormities - The Broken Leg on Broadway.

We flatter ourselves that, as a people, we are fond of horses. We are also fond of saying that we are a humane people. Are we? Let us lookt a little into the matter, and see whether each of us, disavowing to himself any part in the great inhumanity of the day, does not judge of public sentiment by his own generous impulses. "I love the noble creatures," says one of this class; "I would rather suffer myself, than treat them with cruelty. No reprobation can be too strong for those who daily torture some of them to death, and every man I know feels exactly as I do." It is hard to press a charge against a whole population in the face of individual disclaimers such as these, and perhaps, in charity, it should be modified into one of carelessness, or indifference to the horrible brutality Broadway daily witnesses, leaving it to each one to decide for himself, how much less culpable than the crime itself is the indifference to it in others.


Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, December 9, 1865.