No. 604
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
November 30, 2021

Her Striped Stockings.

November 30, 2021
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 Welcome to this week's Link Dump!Feel free to join the Strange Company staffers for a stroll around the grounds.A particularly gruesome (and notorious) murder case.Does Egypt have a second Sphinx?15,000 years ago, kids were playing with clay.How DNA in dirt is a boon for scientists.Frank Lloyd Wright and the upside-down H.3/I Atlas has probably been weird for a very, very long time.It is my
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Strange Company - 4/3/2026
"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
New York didn’t invent April Fools Day; this holiday might date back all the way to ancient Rome. But starting in the 19th century, April 1 in Gotham has been a day to celebrate with stupid pranks, outrageous hoaxes, the mocking of politicians and business leaders, and since 1986, a parade down Fifth Avenue. This […]
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Ephemeral New York - 3/30/2026
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
New York Journal, March 18, 1898. When the news of London’s 1888 Whitechapel Murders, attributed to “Jack the Ripper,” crossed the Atlantic, Americans were instantly fascinated. The vision of a dark, elusive killer, mutilating women without motive, was morbidly titillating, and the name Jack the Ripper fired the popular imagination. In the nascent age of yellow journalism, no one was more
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Murder By Gaslight - 4/4/2026
Whatever you believe about the guilt or innocence of Lizzie Borden, I have always believed film makers do a great injustice to the story by not beginning at the beginning- the death on March 26, 1863 of the first Mrs. Borden. In the dying moments of Sarah Morse, Emma takes on the weight of the care of her little sister, not yet three years old. Emma herself was just 12 on March 1st. Emma has seen her mother suffer for a long time, seen her pain and loss of little Alice Esther. Emma is old enough
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Lizzie Borden: Warps and Wefts - 3/26/2026
  [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
The “Prisoners’ March.” | Illicit Distilleries.

Her Striped Stockings.

Striped-Stockings

The other day a groceryman at Vallejo, Cal., gave a large party, at which the daughter of the carriage painter who lived next door created a decided sensation. It was not that she was more handsomely attired than the other ladies present, but that when she gyrated in the "dance of death" she was observed to display the only pair of pink silk stockings in the room. She left the house for a few minutes at the expiration of the dance, and in the next waltz exhibited a pair of light blue dittoes. An hour later her crushed and exasperated female friends beheld' these supplemented by further hose of a delicate chocolate shade. And so it went on, until her miserable rivals determined to follow her the next time she disappeared. They traced her to her father's paint-shop in the backyard, where she was discovered brush in hand and about ornamenting her nether extremities with a final artistic coat of light salmon. The exulting spies rushed back with the damaging news, but it was too late. The men were all too tight to understand, the music had gone home and the lights were being put out. Thus it is that fraud and duplicity triumph, honest simplicity walks around with a darn on its calf and a hole in its heel.

 

Illustrated Police News, November 3, 1877.