If you’re looking for a great non-fiction easy summer
read, I suggest The Good Old Days-They
Were Terrible! by Otto L. Bettmann.
Each glimpse into some aspect of the 19th century covers only
two pages, so it’s a book you can grab and put down throughout the day – or get
lost in for a few hours.
The entry about summer makes one appreciate the
invention of the window screen in the 1880’s. Imagine flies and mosquitoes all
over your food, nesting on you and your bedding at night, getting into your
food and drink! Children were given leafy branches to shoo them away while
family members tried to eat a meal in peace and without bug garnishes.
Bettmann quotes Russel Lynes who said screens were,
“the most humane contribution the 19th century made to the preservation of
sanity and good temper.”
And then there were the electric trolleys. I’ve been
on delightful trolley rides but my experiences are a far cry from the 19th
century trolleys which at best, reached a max of 25 miles per hour. Not even
considering the spaghetti of overhead wires, the trolleys made little progress
through the busy streets because they followed horse drawn vehicles or waited
while they clopped across the rail. A photo of a Chicago intersection showed a
pile up of huge proportion with trolleys, trucks, people and horses milling in
the road. H.G Wells called the Chicago streets “one horse cry for discipline.”
Other
topics in the book include housing, air, work, crime, food and drink, health,
etc. Being your full service blogger, I checked and it is available at Amazon
and Amazon Prime as well as in our area libraries for local readers.
Enjoy!
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