by david allan van nostrand | Feb 23, 2026 | Americana, Fads, The Wayback Machine, The world around us
Rose O’Neill was nineteen years old when she left Nebraska for the Big Apple in search of work as an illustrator and cartoonist. A self-taught artist, she had enjoyed six years of success selling her artwork in Omaha, so she had reason to be hopeful. A Closer Look at...
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 16, 2026 | Americana, The Wayback Machine
The Stanford University team working on interweb search technology called their product “BackRub.” Later, wiser heads suggested if the goal was to provide enormous volumes of search results, the name ought to at least suggest hugeness beyond what we now think is vast....
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 9, 2026 | Human Behavior, Psychology, The world around us, Trivia
The big event of the 14th century was the Black Plague. After killing off half the population of Europe, the Black Death (its street name) left the other half living with hunger, fear, and poverty. Regular people had to make do with scraps while the elites lived in...
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 2, 2026 | Americana, Behind the curtain, The Wayback Machine
Party lines aren’t the ones where people wait to get in where the action’s going on. Not the Texas Two-Step, the Electric Slide, or the Hustle, either. In rural areas there were so few telephone owners that it was impractical and too costly to run lines to each...
