Though his child has long vanished from the sporting scene, Edward Payson Weston was known during his lifetime as the “Father of Modern Pedestrianism,” a pastime that rewarded those who could hoof great distances with surprising speed. I’ve blogged about the world-class walker before, when Brian Phillips of Grantland wrote a sparkling piece about the recent Weston biography, A Man in a Hurry. In this classic photograph, the legendary athlete, profiled at 70 years old, was far removed from his glory days of the 1860s-70s, but perhaps because of good health brought about from his peripatetic exploits, he was still twenty years from his death. Of course, it must be noted that his demise may have been hastened by an accident in 1927 in which he was struck by a NYC taxi, as the roads, which had become the domain of cars, had little room for a remnant of the 1800s who was so accursed by their encroachment. Weston could see the future and didn’t like it, though he was helpless, as we all are, to stop it.

In the same year that this image was taken, the native Rhode Islander wrote an article about one of his cross-country walks, a planned 100-day excursion from New York to San Francisco, for the July 16, 1909 New York Times. The article:

“San Francisco, Cal.–Having completed my walk from New York City to San Francisco last night, and enjoyed a restful sleep. I walked to the Post Office Building here this morning and delivered to Postmaster Fiske of San Francisco a letter which I carried in my walk from Postmaster Morgan of New York City. I received a cordial greeting from Postmaster Fisk and his subordinates. 

A pleasant incident of my arrival at Oakland last night was the hearty welcome and congratulations extended to me by officials and employees of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. This company did so much for me that I fail to find words to express my appreciation. 

Regarding my feelings and condition, I would say that I feel like uttering bitter words, but do not feel inclined to make excuses.

I have received hundreds of letters and telegrams congratulating me on my wonderful achievement, and each one makes me wish I deserved it. Full of vigor and strength, I am disappointed that the elements were against me, and I frankly acknowledge that had it not been for the unbounded kindness of the officers and employees of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, I should not have dared to come further than Ogden, Utah. I practically had the right of way on the railroad, and every engineer tooted the whistle on his engine as it passed me.

I contend I walked a distance of upward of 4,000 miles in 104 days and 5 hours, and while it exceeds the distance between New York and San Francisco nearly 700 miles, and far excels any previous record, yet technically it is a failure, and I do not feel inclined to close my public career with a failure.

The expenses of this walk were upwards of $2,500. Some dozen prominent cities in the East have made offers to arrange for testimonial lectures on my return, not only to help liquidate my financial loss, but to show that my object lesson in the journey, in striving to elevate in popular esteem the exercise of walking, is appreciated. 

If in the next two weeks I shall receive assurances from a sufficient number of cities and towns between Omaha and New York that they will arrange for lectures and send such word to me in care of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, San Francisco, then I will try to prove myself worthy of their confidence and esteem by showing how easy it is for any one to walk from San Francisco to New York by direct route within 100 secular days.

There are three very dear friends who oppose this extra walk, but when I convince them that it is my only salvation, and that it would still keep me young and healthy, I know they will fall in with my plans.

Meanwhile the only trouble I have is an awful appetite.”

This classic photograph profiles late-life Mary Baker Eddy, who was the founder of the hokum known as Christian Science, a scripture-based faith healing that believed medicine and hygiene were unnecessary. She was born in 1812 in New Hampshire, began “hearing voices” in her girlhood, and was soon known for her ability to “cure” animals and people alike. Her talent and charisma and persistence allowed her to remarkably create an international cult in an age long before mass media. Even her detractors were awed by her unlikely empire. In an otherwise lacerating 1903 critique of Mrs. Eddy, Mark Twain wrote: “She is interesting enough without an amicable agreement. In several ways she is the most interesting woman that ever lived, and the most extraordinary. The same may be said of her career, and the same may be said of its chief result. She started from nothing. Her enemies charge that she surreptitiously took from Quimby a peculiar system of healing which was mind-cure with a Biblical basis. She and her friends deny that she took anything from him. This is a matter which we can discuss by-and-by. Whether she took it or invented it, it was—materially—a sawdust mine when she got it, and she has turned it into a Klondike.”

Eddy became a shadowy figure in her later years–was she a morphine addict as rumors suggested? was she mentally unfit to care for herself?–though it didn’t diminish her hold on the public’s attention. She died on December 3, 1910. A passage about the origins of her calling from an article about her two days later in the New York Times:

“Some of her friendly biographers quote Mrs. Eddy as having said in describing the discovery of her so-called psychological sense:

When I was very little I used to hear voices. They called me. They spoke my name. ‘Mary! Mary!’ I used to go to my mother and say, ‘Mother did you call me? What do you want?’ and she would say ‘No, my child, I didn’t call you.’ Then I would go away and play but the voices would call me again distinctly.

There was a day when my cousin, whom I dearly loved. was playing with me, and she too heard the voices. She said: ‘You’re mother’s calling you, Mary,’ and when I didn’t go I could hear them again. But I knew that it wasn’t mother. My cousin didn’t know what to make of my behavior, because I was always an obedient child. ‘Why, Mary,’ she repeated, ‘what do you mean by not going?’

When she heard the voices again she went to my mother, and my cousin said:

‘Didn’t you call Mary?’ My mother asked if I heard voices and I said I did. Then she asked my cousin if she heard them, and when she said ‘Yes,’ my mother cried.

She talked with me that night and told me, when I heard them again–no matter where I was-to say: ‘What wouldst Thou, Lord? Here I am.’ That is what Samuel said, you know, when the Lord called him. She told me not to be afraid, but to surely answer.

The next day I heard voices again, but was too frightened to speak. I felt badly. Mother noticed it and asked me if I had heard the call again. When I said that I was too frightened to say what she had told me she talked with me and told me that the next time I must surely answer and not fear.

When the voice came again I was in bed. I answered as quickly as I could, as she had told me to do, and when I had spoken a curious lightness came over me. I remember it so well! It seemed to me I was being lifted off my little bed, and I put out my hands and caught the sides. From that time I never heard the voices. They ceased.”

General Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky, profiled in these classic photographs, was a wonderful and terrible man, an abolitionist from a family of slave owners who went mental in his dotage, essentially imprisoning a very reluctant 15-year-old wife when he was in his eighties. He was also a politician, an expert duelist, a Yale graduate and so much more. From a report of the death of the nonagenarian in the July 23, 1903 New York Times:

“Gen. Cassius Marcellus was famous for such a multitude of daring deeds, political feats, and personal eccentricities that it is hard to choose any one act or characteristic more distinguished than the rest. As a duelist, always victorious, he was said to have been implicated in more encounters and to have killed more men than any fighter living. As a politician he was especially famous for his anti-slavery crusades in Kentucky, having become imbued with abolition principles while he was a student at Yale, despite the fact that his father was a wealthy slave owner. As a diplomat while Minister to Russia during and after the civil war, he took a prominent part in the negotiations that resulted in the annexation of Alaska.

The act of Gen. Clay’s life that has commanded most attention in recent years was his marriage to a fifteen-year-old peasant girl after he had reached his eighty-fourth birthday. In 1887, he had married his first wife, Miss Warfield, a member of an aristocratic family of slave holders, and years afterward when he had become an ardent disciple of Tolstoi, he came to the conclusion that he ought to wed a ‘daughter of the people.’ In November, 1894, he chose Dora Richardson, the daughter of a woman who had been a domestic for some time in his mansion at White Hall, near Lexington.

When the little girl became his wife, the General proceeded to employ a governess for her. She rebelled. Then he sent her to the same district school she had attended previously. The fact that he supplied her with the most beautiful French gowns and lavished money upon her, she did not consider compensations for the teasing she got at the hands of her fellow-pupils. In two months he had to take her back home, still uneducated. 

The old warrior’s eccentricities increased during his declining years, and after his latest marriage he thought little of anything except his dream that some ancient enemy was trying to murder him and his ‘peasant wife,’ as he called her. She, in spite of his kindnesses, kept running away from White Hall, and finally he decided he must get a divorce. This he did, charging her with abandonment. She soon married a worthless young mountaineer named Brock, who was once arrested for counterfeiting. Then the General began to plot to get her back, having already given a farm and house to her and her new husband, only to hear that Brock sold the property. At last Brock died, and a few months ago dispatches from Kentucky stated that the General was trying in vain to prevail upon his ‘child wife’ to return to him. She refused persistently, never having outgrown the dislike for the luxurious life with which he surrounded her and still preferring the simple country existence to which she was born.”

Capt. Roald Amundsen, the great Norwegian explore of polar regions, is profiled in this classic 1909 photograph. The arduous journeys that he and his rivals undertook to unravel Earth’s mysteries were large and heroic, but in a March 11, 1912 New York Times article, Amundsen discussed the smaller details of being an explorer that usually get lost in the history books. Excerpts about dog-eating and tooth-pulling:

“With regard to food, we had full rations all the way, but in that climate full rations are a very different thing to having as much as a man can eat. There seems little limit to one’s eating powers when doing a hard sledging journey. However, on the return journey we had not merely full rations, but as much as we could eat from the depots after passing 86 degrees.

‘The first dogs were eaten on the journey to the pole in 85 1/2 degrees, when twenty-four were killed. In spite of the fact that they had not always been able to obtain full meals, the dogs were fat and proved most delicious eating. It is anything but a real hardship to eat dog meat. …

‘Washing was a luxury never indulged in on the journey, nor was there any shaving, but as the beard has to be kept short to prevent ice accumulating from one’s breath, a beard-cutting machine which we had taken along proved invaluable.

‘Another article taken was a tooth extractor, and this also proved valuable, for one man had a tooth which became so bad that it was absolutely essential that it should be pulled out, and this could hardly have been done without a proper instrument.”"

The Russian famine which began in 1921 claimed six million people and placed many more at the brink of starvation, willing to do anything–anything–to avoid succumbing to the privations. This classic 1921 photograph shows the starving who had turned to cannibalism to survive. From the June 9, 1922 New York Times:

“London–A shocking story of despair, death and cannibalism in Russia was narrated to The Associated Press today by William Shafroth, son of former Governor Shafroth of Colorado, who arrived in London after a year’s work with the American Relief Administration in the Russian famine regions.

The desperate people, he said, are eating human beings, diseased horses, dogs, and cats. Cemeteries are being dug up and long-buried bodies snatched as food. In their hunger-madness the people are stealing bodies from morgues and hospitals to eat. Mr. Shafroth, who had charge of 20,000 Russians working for the American Relief Administration in the Samara district, is emaciated after his arduous work among the starving, dying and shelterless. But he gave ample proof that the famine sufferers did not try to seize him for cannibalistic purposes, as had been reported while he was in Russia. He said, however, that a Russian member of the A.R.A., who died of typhus, was disinterred at night and eaten by crazed inhabitants. This gave rise to the report that Mr. Shafroth had been devoured.

In some respects the young American’s narrative is unequaled even by the tragic pictures in Daniel Defoe’s journal of the plague year.

‘I know one instance,’ said Mr. Shafroth, ‘where a distracted mother of five children killed the youngest in order to appease the pangs of the rest of the flock; but the oldest boy cried bitterly when he saw his mother sever his little brother’s head and place the body into a pot. He refused to eat the flesh.”

We see ghosts sometimes because we’re afraid of death. If others haven’t completely died, maybe we can also somehow go on forever?

In 1848, the Fox sisters (Margaret, Kate and Leah) of New York told a lie about ghosts that people wanted to believe, and so they did. The two younger siblings (pictured in the above undated classic photograph) claimed that they could communicate with a murdered man who made “rappings” on the floor upon command, and with a little sleight of hand–foot, mostly–they caused a national sensation. The girls were soon “performing” in large halls and arenas around the world. The so-called intelligentsia was just as gullible as were the rubes; James Fenimore Cooper allegedly prepared for death by meeting with the girls. And Spiritualism, discrete from religion, had begun in earnest the United States

The Fox girls may have had an unusual beginning, but their ending was quite predictable: Interest in them faded, a lifetime of lying tied them in knots they could never extricate themselves from, and they died in poverty and obscurity, interred in pauper graves. From a November 21, 1909 New York Times article about spiritualist cranks in America:

“The Fox sisters were the founders of modern Spiritualism. It was in 1848 that spirit rappings were first heard in their home at Hydesville, N.Y. It created an unparalleled sensation, and from the pilgrimages to the Fox shrine grew the great religion–or industry–of Spiritualism. 

According to a confession subsequently made by Margaret Fox, she and her sister Kate, then children, found they could produce peculiar sounds by the manipulation of the toes and fingers. They greatly enjoyed the perturbation of their mother, who could not understand the mysterious sounds and began to think the house was haunted.

She finally told the neighbors and the resulting sensation naturally tickled the children more than ever. But their married sister Leah Fish, who lived in Rochester, learned the origin of the mysterious sounds and saw the commercial possibilities. She took them with her to Rochester, and in a short time the whole world was talking of them.

Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were among their visitors. Elisha Kent Kane, the great explorer, fell in love with Margaret and is said to have married her, though his family never acknowledged it. Kate, who was the first to discover the power the sisters possessed, kept up the seances until her marriage in 1873.

In 1888, Margaret Fox confessed that the whole thing had been a fraud, and Kate indorsed the confession. Leah Fox was then dead. Subsequently Margaret retracted the confession, and this retraction completely satisfied the Spiritualists, who at her funeral predicted that the year 1848 (the year of the first rappings) would loom higher in history than the year 1 of the Christian calendar.

But the Spiritualists were never able to explain how it was that Margaret and Kate Fox not only confessed the fraud, but gave public exhibitions of how it was committed. On October 21, 1888, Margaret Fox appeared before an audience of 2,000 persons in the Academy of Music, in this city, and gave a demonstration. Physicians went upon the stage and felt her foot as she made the motions by which she had produced the raps heard around the world. Then she stood in her stocking feet on a little pine platform six inches from the floor, and without the slightest perceptible movement made raps audible all over the theatre. She went down into the audience, and there, resting her foot on that of a spectator, showed how by the motion of her toe the sound was produced.

She gave other public exhibitions, and her subsequent retraction of her confession did not explain away the demonstrations. Kate Fox became a dipsomaniac, and her children were taken away from her because of that fact. She died in 1892, and Margaret a year later. Margaret’s last words were: ‘Give me one more drink.’ She, too, had become a dipsomaniac.”

Along with temperance, abolition and suffrage, dress reform was a major movement spearheaded by women in the 1800s. Females at the time were encumbered by garb that was cumbersome–and occasionally even dangerous–and wanted the right to wear more “rational clothing” without fear of reprisal, even arrest. One of the most outspoken of dress reformers was Dr. Mary Walker, a brilliant surgeon who wore a military uniform while providing medical attention to soldiers during the Civil War. After the war, Walker was so vehement and forceful in her insistence on women wearing men’s clothes that she was shunned, for the most part, by men and women alike.

This undated classic photograph shows Walker late in life, adorned in formal men’s wear. From an article about her in the March 12, 1886 New York Times:

“Newport, R.I.–This evening Dr. Mary Walker was for a brief period detained at the police station, where she expressed her surprise and disgust at the officials of a city who did not know the law, and who had laid itself liable by obliging her to accompany Officer Scott from Commercial Wharf to the office of the Chief of Police. The doctor arrived here by boat from Providence at 6 o’clock, and desired to be shown the residence of Miss Sarah Briggs, an old friend whom she had not seen since the Union soldiers were taken to Portsmouth Grove, near this place, for treatment during the civil war. She had been pleading in Providence with the members of the Legislature in behalf of woman’s suffrage, and for the payment of a Revolutionary claim which she claimed the State owed her friend Miss Briggs. She had no sooner reached the plank walk when, at the instance of several females who had seen her on the boat, the officer told her that she must accompany him tot he police station. She told the officer her name and said that he was violating the Constitution by interfering with her freedom. The officer, strange as it may seem, had never heard of Dr. Mary Walker and he insisted upon taking her to the station.

The doctor reluctantly accompanied the officer, and was followed by a crowd of men and boys, who, it would appear, had never seen a woman dressed in men’s clothing before, and it was a sight which they will never forget. The Chief of Police, being a man of intelligence and conversant with the laws, expressed his regret at her arrest, and apologized for his officer, who, he said, had acted in good faith. This would not satisfy the doctor, who was naturally very angry, and she insisted upon learning the officer’s name, and demanded that he be discharged from the police force. She was forced to admit, however, that she had been arrested in other cities by mistake. She remained at the station for some time, and repeated the law for the benefit of the officer who had arrested her. She also delivered quite a lecture upon sundry subjects, for which she is noted, and then walked out of the office with her hat on one side and with her cane in a very dudish position. The incident created a decided sensation. She will leave town to-morrow. It is rumored that she does not intend to let the matter drop, and a few wiseacres predict that she will try and make trouble for the city.”

Long before commercial planes, helicopters and certainly drones, Julius Neubronner invented pigeon photography, attaching a small camera to carrier pigeons, capturing great aerial photography for postcards and such. From Alyssa Coppelman at Slate: “In 1907, the German apothecary (who ran his family’s business) invented pigeon photography as a means of tracking his carrier pigeons. One of his pigeons used for getting medicinal supplies more quickly (a sort of FedEx pigeon) had stayed away a month before returning to him. Looking to track the pigeon’s journeys, Neubronner did what any curious owner would do: He strapped a small, timed camera to the pigeon to track its future travels.”

Fittingly, Edgar Allan Poe’s death was a mysterious one. The haunting author, the first American to try to make his living solely as a writer, was found disoriented, ranting and ragged on the streets of Baltimore on an autumn day in 1849. Nobody could tell what had put him in such a state at age 40, and he was taken to a hospital where he died a few days later. Was his puzzling death the result of drunkenness or rabies or murder? No one still knows for sure. Muddling matters even further was that Poe’s enemy, the editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold, somehow became the executor of his estate and did his best to sully the writer’s reputation, suggesting his end resulted from a dissolute lifestyle.

A January 20, 1907 New York Times article promised to make sense of the puzzle nearly six decades after the Poe’s tragic demise, asserting that scientific breakthroughs had made it possible to understand what killed the poet and short-story writer. The paper called on one of the finest alienists of the era to undertake the mission, though great clarity didn’t exactly result from the enterprise. The opening of “Edgar Allan Poe’s Tragic Death Explained“:

“Edgar Allan Poe, the author of ‘The Raven,’ ‘The Gold Bug,’ and ‘The Murders of the Rue Morgue’–to name merely the most popular of his works–the writer whose power startled Dickens and excited the admiration of Irving, Lowell, and Browning, and whom Tennyson called ‘the most original genius that America has produced,’ was found in the streets of Baltimore on Oct. 3, 1847 [sic], dazed, in rags, a physical and mental wreck. He lay for days unconscious or raving like a madman, then sank to death. His condition was ascribed to a debauch or drugs, or both, his pitiful end to mania-a-potu.

In his lifetime and since his death, Poe’s personal habits and the circumstance of his end have been the topics of endless discussion, in which vituperation has been mingled with vehement defense. He has been pictured as a transcendent genius and a drunkard, a polished gentleman and a surly misanthrope. 

Within the last few weeks, the whole topic has been reopened by the approaching dedication of a monument to Poe in Richmond, Va. To the existing mass of contradictory testimony and discussion has been added much new material on the subject. Some of this, including letters, accounts of personal experiences, and the first article dealing with Poe’s case purely from the medical standpoint, has been published very recently. Taken as a whole, however, the evidence leaves the layman as much puzzled as ever regarding Poe’s complex personality and the circumstances of his death.

To arrive at the truth of the matter and to clear Poe’s name of injustice, if such existed, the New York Times has gathered all the evidence relating to the subject, particularly the letters and accounts recently printed, and submitted them to an alienist who ranks high as an authority on such matters in this city, and a physician whose practice particularly fits him to deal with the subject. This specialist undertook to review all of this evidence and to draw therefrom his conclusions regarding Poe as a man and his fatal malady.

The expert offered a surprising opinion. It contradicts the contention that Poe died of mania-a-potu. His death is traced to cerebral oedema, or ‘water on the brain’ or ‘wet brain,’ a disease unknown in the author’s day, but now well recognized with the advance of medical science. The more recent theories that Poe suffered from psychic epilepsy or paresis are discounted. Moreover the physician’s study of the case has resulted in the belief that the psychopathic phases of Poe’s case were so unusual that his mental responsibility is to be seriously questioned. His opinion follows:

“In reviewing the case of a man of undoubted genius, like Edgar Allan Poe, we must remember that Nature, while developing certain brain centres to an unusual degree, has neglected other mental attributes, so that they are far below those found in the average man. Thus Poe’s powers of imagination were abnormal at the expense of his will power, his ability to resist temptation, and his recuperation in case of misfortune. Such facts do not apply to men of exceptional abilities like Washington–abilities often confounded with genius–but to men of very exceptional gifts in only one direction. Lord Byron furnished an example of this condition. Its presence marked Poe as a weak man. His inherited characteristics were bad. His nervous system was constitutionally deranged; he was abnormal to a degree that leads one to seriously doubt his mental or moral responsibility. Add to these elements his reckless youth, the ease with which he was surrounded early in his life, and the years of poverty and misfortune which followed, and his tragic end is already foreshadowed.”

The above classic photograph depicts Babe Ruth in the year he became a New York Yankee and tried on the pinstripes for the first time. The sale of his contract from the Boston Red Sox (for $125,000) stunned observers of the game. Truth be told, there weren’t a lot of great players in organized baseball’s early decades (because of the color line, among other reasons), so someone truly gifted like Ruth could have a massive impact on an organization. Fans in both Boston and New York were wise to that fact (for the most part), and this trade set off what would become a nearly hundred-year war between the clubs. From a January 7, 1920 New York Times article in the immediate aftermath of the deal:

“Babe Ruth, the Colossus of Swat, has signed his name to a document promising to play with the Yankees next season. Manager Miller Huggins, who went to Los Angeles to sign the player, wired President Jacob Ruppert yesterday that the home run slugger had signed an agreement to play here. Manager Huggins’s message also said that Ruth was very much pleased with the transfer that brought him to New York and would be delighted to play here next Summer. Huggins left California last night for New York.

Just what agreement Ruth has signed is not known by the officials of the New York club. That he has not yet signed a contract is certain from Huggins’s telegram. It is believed to be a tentative agreement that he will sign a contract at a certain time. Ruth expects to leave for the East next Monday. and his new contract will probably be signed in New York. He demanded a contract calling for $20,000 a year from Boston and this figure will undoubtedly be the basis of the new contract which the Yankees will give him. According to Huggins’s message, however, there is no question that Ruth is pleased with the change and glad to join the New York club. 

The purchase of Ruth for the record price of $125,000 was the topic of the conversation along Broadway yesterday and baseball fans of all ages and sizes already see a chance for the Yankees to land the 1920 pennant. Manhattan’s fondest dream of having a world series at the Polo Grounds between the Giants and Yankees now becomes a tangible thing and that is the big event which New York fans will be rooting for all Summer.

The two Colonels–Ruppert and Huston–were praised on all sides for their aggressiveness and liberality in landing baseball’s greatest attraction. If the club, strengthened by Ruth and by other players the owners have in mind, does not carry off the flag, it will not be the fault of the owners.

Boston is duly shocked at the sale of Ruth and there is a wide difference of opinion about its effect on the game in the Hub. The newspapers yesterday had cartoons showing a ‘For Sale’ sign on the Boston Public Library and on the Boston Common. They also picture Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox, in darkness, with a sign ‘Building Lots for Sale.’

Two Bostonians prominent in Hub baseball in the past, Fred Tenney and Hugh Duffy, are quoted as saying that the sale of Ruth is a good thing for the Red Sox and that it will be a better club without him.”

Babe Ruth, 1918.