by david allan van nostrand | Nov 7, 2022 | Americana, Anthropology, The Wayback Machine
Say thanks this November 11th to a black veteran of the U.S. military Black soldiers served in the U.S. Army and Navy during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. In 1820, John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, acting in his position as United States Secretary of...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 11, 2022 | Anthropology, Case Study, Outsiders
Not many people know that Trinidad is closer to Venezuela (6 miles) than it is to Tobago (20 miles). Just 1,800 square miles, Trinidad is smaller than Rhode Island, but nearly twenty times the size of Tobago, a little squirt of an island. More than a million people...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 27, 2022 | Americana, Anthropology, Marketing, The Wayback Machine
In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, advertisers hired lots of second- and third-tier actors to play fictitious characters in their TV commercials. Jesse White was the lonely Maytag Repairman, Jan Miner played Madge the Manicurist for Palmolive dishwashing liquid, Nancy Walker...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 20, 2022 | Americana, Anthropology, Marketing, The Wayback Machine
The Chicago World’s Fair was opened to the first of 27 million visitors when U.S. president Grover Cleveland pushed a button and the newfangled electric lighting dazzled goggle-eyed fairgoers who only knew lanterns and candles. PBS tells us “Visitors gawked at...
by david allan van nostrand | Feb 28, 2022 | Anthropology, Human Behavior, Items in the News
Most people in the USA know when small children lose baby teeth, they are told to put them under the pillow and when they wake up next morning, the Tooth Fairy will have left something for them. The tooth “disappears” the same way Santa “appears” – while the...
by david allan van nostrand | May 10, 2021 | Anthropology, Items in the News
Hundreds of car companies have gone out of business, most in the earliest days of automobiles. Did you know the beer company Anheuser-Busch once built a car? Or that a company named Apple Automobile built a car in 1917? Alcoa, the aluminum company built a car, as did...
