On This Day in American History — September 1, 1897

Boston and New York were apparently having a little race.

The prize? Being the first city in North America to put a rapid transit system underground.

Boston came out swinging and opened the first section of the Tremont Street Subway in 1897. While New York was still working on its plans, Boston basically said, “Move over, we’re taking this underground.” And just like that, Boston became home to North America’s first underground rapid transit system.
Of course, this wasn’t the subway experience we know today. No smartphones. No digital signs. No air conditioning. And definitely no app telling you that your train is delayed because of “signal issues.” Instead, the system was primarily designed to move streetcars underground and get them out of Boston’s increasingly crowded streets.

But this was about much more than getting people from Point A to Point B. Boston’s subway helped introduce a new way of thinking about transportation in America. As cities grew, Americans needed faster and more efficient ways to move people—and the solution was sometimes as simple as building another city underneath the city.

Why does it matter to American history?

The Tremont Street Subway helped usher in the era of modern rapid transit in North America. It changed how Americans could live, work, and travel in growing cities and helped shape the urban transportation systems that millions of Americans would eventually depend on.
So today, the next time you're sitting underground waiting for a train that is “running 10 minutes behind schedule,” remember…
Boston was underground first

https://youtu.be/60ONJ2-tlKY

Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency was a mixture of triumph and controversy. He expanded the executive branch’s power, challenged entrenched interests, and redefined America’s global role. His actions, however, raised questions over the limits of Presidential power and the moral justification for military intervention, such as in the Philippines, as well as the Panama Canal. Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War was a testament to his diplomatic prowess. Yet, his foreign policy sometimes veered into aggression. His conservation efforts were visionary, while his imperial ventures sparked debates.

America’s First Bank Heist?!

Picture Philadelphia in 1798. America is still a young nation, George Washington has recently left office, and the country is still figuring things out.

Then somebody looked at the Bank of Pennsylvania and apparently thought:

"You know what would make today interesting? Stealing the bank’s money."

And that’s exactly what happened.

In 1798, the Bank of Pennsylvania was robbed in what is generally considered the first recorded bank robbery in American history. No getaway cars. No security cameras. No silent alarms. Just criminals taking advantage of a financial system that was still learning how to protect itself.
The robbery exposed just how vulnerable America’s early banks were. As the country grew, so did its financial institutions—and eventually, the need for better locks, procedures, security, and accountability.

Why does it matter?

Because American history isn't just presidents, wars, and famous speeches. Sometimes history is made by somebody deciding to walk into a bank and walk out with money that doesn't belong to them.

Even America's criminals occasionally helped teach the country a lesson.

Sometimes you have to look at the strange stories to understand how America became the country it is today.

https://youtu.be/mkZyYxHeDAQ

The Battle of Austerlitz is often regarded as one of Napoleon Bonaparte's most brilliant military victories. The battle demonstrates Napoleon's skill at anticipating enemy movements and preparing countermeasures before they happened. Also known as the "Battle of the Three Emperors", Austerlitz was a turning point in the War of the Third Coalition.

Napoleon had deliberately weakened his right wing in full view of the enemy. The Allies assumed that the French position was weaker than it really was and, confident in their numerical superiority, planned to overwhelm the French right. This was exactly what Napoleon was counting on.

Napoleon intended to draw the Allied left away from the Pratzen Heights and then seize the heights with the French center. Lannes and Murat were tasked with holding the French left against the Allied right, while the main French counterattack would strike the Allied center once it had been weakened.

The Allied left began its assault on the weak French right as expected. French troops around Telnitz and Sokolnitz were pushed back, but the timely arrival of Davout's III Corps helped stabilize the position. As more Allied troops moved toward the French right, the Allied center became increasingly exposed. The dense fog also helped conceal the movement of the French forces preparing to attack the Pratzen Heights.

As Napoleon observed the movement of Allied troops away from the center, he ordered Soult's IV Corps to attack the Pratzen Heights. After intensive fighting, the French broke through the Allied center and captured the heights. The Allied army was now split in two, leaving its left wing increasingly isolated. French forces then turned south from the Pratzen Heights and attacked the Allied left, forcing it into a disastrous retreat.

The victory effectively destroyed the Third Coalition. Austria was forced to sue for peace, and the resulting Treaty of Pressburg dramatically strengthened Napoleon's position in Europe.

If you are interested in reading more about the Battle of Austerlitz, please have a look at my article. I have kept the narrative simple, clear, and historically accurate, and I would love to hear your feedback and recommendations. If there are any historical topics you would like to read about, please drop me a note.

Louis Wain was a British illustrator best known for his drawings of cats — often anthropomorphic ones playing music, going to school, having parties, getting into arguments, and generally behaving like people.

He was enormously popular in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, but today he is often remembered for something else: a series of increasingly abstract and geometric cat images that is frequently presented as a chronological record of his mental illness.

The problem is that the famous sequence does not appear to be chronological at all.

Most of the works were undated. In the 1930s, psychiatrist Walter Maclay acquired eight Wain drawings in very different styles and arranged them into what he believed was a progression from conventional cat portraits to highly abstract compositions. That arrangement was later reproduced in psychiatric and art-historical literature and eventually became the familiar “disintegrating cats” story.

We recently put together a detailed article on Wain, using biographies, contemporary newspapers, archival material, and surviving medical records from Springfield and Bethlem.

Among other things, we looked at:

• what his hospital records actually say about his condition and diagnosis;
• the fact that Bethlem recorded paraphrenia, rather than schizophrenia;
• repeated notes by doctors that he continued painting and, at one point, had “lost none of his technique”;
• the origins of the famous abstract-cat sequence;
• his later years at Napsbury;
• and some biographical questions, including the age of his wife Emily, where primary records suggest she was about 17 years older than Wain.

What interested me most was how different the archival picture is from the very neat popular narrative of “mental illness progresses, therefore the art progressively falls apart”. His condition was clearly serious, but his artistic ability, everyday functioning, and psychiatric symptoms did not all change in one simple straight line.

The full article is here if anyone is interested: https://bodrovis.tech/posts/louis-wain-illness-art-historical-evidence/

I’d also be interested in hearing about other artists whose work has acquired a similar retrospective medical or biographical narrative.

HISTORY DAD: WHEN TALKING BECAME A 24-HOUR JOB

Imagine being in a meeting that lasts 24 hours.

Now imagine you’re not allowed to leave.

On August 28, 1957, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond stepped onto the Senate floor and began what became the longest single-person filibuster in Senate history. His goal was to delay and ultimately block the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

And how long did he talk?

24 hours and 18 minutes. 😳

Yes… 24 HOURS.

Thurmond talked through the night, reading from laws, court decisions, and other documents. He even came prepared with throat lozenges and malted milk balls. Because apparently, when you're planning to talk for an entire day, snacks are part of the strategy.

But behind the unusual story was a serious moment in American history. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 was an important early federal effort to strengthen voting and civil rights protections. Although Thurmond's filibuster did not stop the bill from becoming law, it demonstrated just how fierce the political battle over civil rights had become.

Why does this matter?

Because American history isn't always about the final vote. Sometimes it's about the struggle to get there. The fight over the Civil Rights Act of 1957 showed the enormous resistance civil rights legislation faced—and helped set the stage for the much stronger civil rights and voting rights laws that followed in the 1960s.

Reminder:
Sometimes history is made by the people who vote…and sometimes by the people who refuse to stop talking.

https://youtu.be/V_2obfufsMY

HISTORY DAD: The Day America Struck Oil!

In 1859, Colonel Edwin L. Drake headed to Titusville, Pennsylvania, with an idea that sounded a little crazy at the time:
Drill into the ground and find oil.

And somehow… it worked!

Drake’s well became the first successful commercial oil well in the United States, helping launch America's petroleum industry. What started as one hole in the Pennsylvania ground soon attracted workers, investors, businesses, and plenty of people hoping to get rich.

But the real story is bigger than just oil. Petroleum would eventually power automobiles, airplanes, factories, ships, and the American military. It would help transform the economy and change everyday life across the country.

WHY IT MATTERS:

Drake didn't just strike oil—he helped start an industry that would become one of the most important forces in American history.
Sometimes history begins with a battlefield. Sometimes it begins in a president's office.

And sometimes… Dad just drills a hole in Pennsylvania and changes the country.

https://youtu.be/_oYowJoLCE0

The Act

On 12 July 1872, seven-year-old Charles Edward Cotton died at his family's home in West Auckland, County Durham. His stepmother, Mary Ann Cotton, had tried to have him placed in the workhouse days earlier and been refused. Contemporary testimony later described him as previously healthy.

The Record

An inquest first returned natural causes. Thomas Riley, a parish official who had already voiced suspicion, pressed for further inquiry. Dr. William Byers Kilburn, who had attended the boy, retained samples from the body and sent them to Dr. Thomas Scattergood, a forensic chemist in Leeds. Scattergood found solid arsenic trioxide in the child's stomach.

Three more bodies from the same household were exhumed that year: Frederick Cotton Jr., Robert Robson Cotton, and Joseph Nattrass. Arsenic turned up in all three.

At trial, the defence argued the arsenic could have come from the wallpaper, or from soft soap the family used against bedbugs. The jury convicted her of one murder, Charles Edward's, after less than two hours' deliberation. A week later, Scattergood revisited the wallpaper and soap theories and recorded his conclusions. Wallpaper dust, he wrote, "would not account for the presence of solid arsenic trioxide in the stomach," and soft soap "could not possibly have been powdered any more than butter could have been powdered." She was hanged at Durham County Gaol on 24 March 1873.

What the trial did not do

Cotton was charged with one death. She was never tried for the other three, despite the arsenic. Arsenic in a body proves arsenic was present. It does not by itself prove who put it there, or that it was deliberate. The other three deaths stayed forensically suspicious and legally unresolved. That is a real gap, not a cover-up, and not the same thing as a conviction.

The Story that followed

By October 1872, three months after Charles Edward's death and before the trial had even started, local papers were compiling every death connected to Cotton across twenty years: husbands, a lover, her mother, a string of children and stepchildren. That list shows the expanded body-count narrative was already circulating before the trial. It is one of the earliest contemporary sources for the number you've probably heard: up to twenty-one victims.

The Distortion

That number is still repeated today as settled fact: in documentaries, in "Britain's first female serial killer" headlines, on true-crime sites. It isn't settled. No court ever tested those other deaths. No toxicological examination is known to have been conducted in most of those cases; they were buried under ordinary causes like "gastric fever" and not exhumed as part of Cotton's prosecution. The number comes from an 1872 newspaper's own compilation of reported deaths across the area, not from a court record, and modern retellings have carried it forward as if it were one.

What's actually provable

One conviction. Arsenic detected in samples from all four bodies examined. A defence that Scattergood revisited and rejected in his own recorded conclusions, but only after the jury had already returned its verdict, not laughed out of court as it's sometimes told. Everything beyond that is allegation, suspicion, or later interpretation, not judicially established murder.