No. 708
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
July 14, 2025

A Poker-playing Prima Donna.

High Jinks on a Lorg Island Sound Steamer
July 8, 2025
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Tag: Women

A Great Game of Football.

Fair college students engage in a rough-and-tumble chase after the pigskin.

11/7/2023

Time Works Many Changes.

Men used to flock to the beach, now they seek sections were roads are good.

9/12/2023

They Were a New Sensation.

Mr. Albiero of Custer City, Dakota, is treated by three rollicking belles to a change from the usual monotony of a cowboy spree.

8/29/2023

Members of the Banjo and Mandolin Clubs.

Mount Holyoke College, 1898-1899.

4/24/2023

Female Wrestling Match in Nevada.

Two female athletes at Virginia city Nevada, indulge in a wrestling match for the championship.

11/8/2022

The First of the Season.

The Earliest Bath of the Year, at Atlantic City

7/5/2022

A Female Gambling House in Boston.

They call it the "retreat" because of its charming privacy and apparent obscurity.

5/31/2022

A Woman Gambler in Nevada.

She Bucks the Tiger and Quits $200 Ahead.

3/29/2022

A Bevy of Stage Beauties.

Five footlight fairies, whose faces and forms charm audiences in London, Paris and New York.

2/22/2022

Forex news live

Two female athletes at Virginia City, Nevada, indulge in a wrestling match for the championship.

11/9/2021

Slid Down the Firemen’s Pole.

How a plucky New Brunswick, N. J., girl won a wager from one of her doubting companions.

4/30/2018

The Enlargement of Woman's Sphere.

A few possibilities of the day when all masculine employments are open to women.

9/11/2017

A Triangular Fight.

9/19/2016

Pugilistic Females.

Two Lebanon, Pa., girls live the same young man and biff each other on the street.

1/4/2016

Collecting Beer Money.

A gang of female rogues, of the East Side, New York, work a little racket of their own.

9/15/2015

Hard Knocks and Horsewhips.

Miss Mamie Gannon, of Jersey City, attacks reporter Lenhart with a horsewhip for traducing her character in his newspaper.

8/10/2015

What it Has Come To.

A scene from feal life in a sixth avenue smoking car—giddy girls who believe in taking a “whiff of the weed” in public as well as in priv

6/22/2015

Society Women Turn Burglars.

A Widow and Her Pretty Daughter Caught Thieving in Men’s Attire in Tecumseh, Mich.

4/13/2015

In a Deadly Folding-Bed.

12/15/2014

Giddy Young Girls.

12/1/2014

Bulldozing a Voter.

There is a strong minded woman “way deown in Maine,” who has been protesting for years against her sex being debarred the right of suffrage.

11/4/2014

Belle Gordon.

9/29/2014

The Girls Have a New Game.

8/18/2014

Beautiful Forever.

7/29/2014

Two Giddy Girls.

Sent up Eight Years for Smoking Cigars in Public.

5/27/2014

Abducted by a Woman.

3/31/2014

Nature versus Art.

2/18/2014

The Last Dip of the Season.

Water witches who frolic with Neptune, no matter how cold his embrace.

9/3/2013

A Bride’s Toggery.

8/27/2013

Undercover Lunatic.

5/26/2013

Breaking Up a Bagnio.

11/18/2012

Beauty as a Shield.

Beauty Conquers avarice and outlawry "We won't rob this house to-night."

7/24/2012

Female Tobacco Chewers.

What a Correspondent Asserts Regarding a Boston Girl.

7/10/2012

A Plucky Elberon, N. J., Girl

1/31/2012

Pretty Female Billiardists

1/3/2012

She Played Kissy Kissy

12/6/2011

Whipped By Women

11/8/2011

Whipped By Women

11/8/2011

A Map of Woman's Heart

10/2/2011
Cambridge Castle, 1730Simon Ockley was Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge from 1711 until his death in 1720.  In 1718, he was briefly imprisoned in Cambridge Castle for debt, where his enforced stay was enlivened by the company of what we would today call a poltergeist.   Our sole source for Ockley’s brush with The Weird are from a series of letters he wrote to a “
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Strange Company - 7/14/2025
Wouldn’t you love to have interviewed Lizzie’s physician, Dr. Nomus S. Paige from Taunton, the jail doctor, ? He found her to be of sane mind and we can now confirm that he had Lizzie moved to the Wright’s quarters while she was so ill after her arraignment with bronchitis, tonsilitis and a heavy cold. We learn that she was not returned to her cell as he did not wish a relapse so close to her trial. Dr. Paige was a Dartmouth man, class of 1861. I have yet to produce a photo of him but stay tuned! His house is still standing at 74 Winthrop St, corner of Walnut in Taunton. He was married twice, with 2 children by his second wife Elizabeth Honora “Nora” Colby and they had 2 children,Katherine and Russell who both married and had families. Many of the Paiges are buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Taunton. Dr. Paige died in April of 1919- I bet he had plenty of stories to tell about his famous patient in 1893!! He was a popular Taunton doctor at Morton Hospital and had a distinguished career. Dr. Paige refuted the story that Lizzie was losing her mind being incarcerated at the jail, a story which was appearing in national newspapers just before the trial. Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, Taunton, courtesy of Find A Grave. 74 Winthrop St., corner of Walnut, home of Dr. Paige, courtesy of Google Maps Obituary for Dr. Paige, Boston Globe April 17, 1919
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 5/24/2025
The article ran in the New York Times on February 19, 1911. “Another Landmark Passing” read the wistful headline on the lower left side of the front page. “The rapid passing away of New York’s famous landmarks was illustrated recently by the sale of the old Rudd mansion on the northeast corner of Riverside Drive […]
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Ephemeral New York - 7/14/2025
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
Jerry Shoaff was drinking with a group of young men at Tom Clarke’s saloon in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the night of October 3, 1888. Eight of them decided to go next to Goelecke’s Saloon on East Main Street. Someone proposed that they order drinks there, then leave without paying. They all agreed to the plan. They stood at the bar and ordered their drinks. As the men finished drinking, they began
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Murder By Gaslight - 7/12/2025
Soapy Smith STAR NotebookPage 20 - Original copy1884Courtesy of Geri Murphy(Click image to enlarge) oapy Smith's early empire growth in Denver.Operating the prize package soap sell racket in 1884. This is page 20, the continuation of page 19, and dated May 6 - May 29, 1884, as well as the continuation of pages 18-19, the beginning of Soapy Smith's criminal empire building in Denver, Colorado.&
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Soapy Smith's Soap Box - 6/1/2025
  [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
| A Man in a Black Mask.

A Poker-playing Prima Donna.

High-Jinks Pugilists, Variety Actors and Opera Bouff People on a Grand Hurrah.

The Long Island Sound steamboat, "City of New York," had a strange conglomeration of characters on board on her trip from New York to New London, Conn., the other night. It was Sunday night, and the Aimee opera troupe, Harrigan & Hart's variety troupe, Johnny Dwyer, who recently fought and whipped Elliott; Dooney Harris, Dwyer's backer, and several gamblers, roughs and sporting men were on board. Aimee played poker with three male members of her troupe all the way up. Dwyer and Dooney entered into friendly gin-hiding competition, and the variety people shocked the Sunday sanctity with variations upon the ballad “Such an education has my Mary Ann." During the voyage Dwyer and Harris discussed theological questions with more energy than discretion, especially Mr. Harris, who, feeling himself aggrieved at being called a Roman pup, gave one of his gang an unanswerable argument in the shape of a knockdown blow. The two troupes numbered one hundred and fifty people, and there were fifty or sixty other passengers. By the time the boat reached New London the bibulous element in the party had succumbed to the insidious character of their beverages, and were quiet as lambs, but Aimee obligingly sang now and then for the benefit of those who had ears to hear. It was a red-hot time all round, and there were some sore and swelled heads in the party of amusement artists which landed in Boston on Monday morning.


Illustrated Police News, June 21, 1879.