by JD Thomas | Sep 23, 2015
“Automobile accidents in the majority of cases are due to some carelessness on the part of the drivers,” says Paul B. Huyette, president of the Quaker City Motor Club, who has formulated ten rules of the road, which, if closely adhered to, he believes, will reduce the number of motor smash-ups to a minimum.
Police courts are overburdened, declared Mr. Huyette, with the trials of traffic offenders, who could avoid the annoyance, expense, and trouble if they followed regulations.
His Ten Rules follow:
First. Keep to the right, especially on turns. This does not mean right center. In the event of an accident, nine times out of ten, if you’re on the right, you’re in the right.
Second. Stay clear of the car tracks and you’ll save tires as well as the tempers of those in the trolley behind. Remember that the track
Is reserved chiefly and primarily for the trolley.
Third. The traffic policeman is your friend. Regard him as such. Co-operate, don’t hinder. The blue coat in the center of the street has the same relation to you as the watchman at a railroad crossing,.
Fourth. Don’t indulge In friendly races in city streets. The results are too frequently painful in more ways than one.
Fifth. Don’t attempt to beat tho ‘stop-go’ sign just as the policeman is changing the signal. If you’re traveling south the driver of a car going east may also attempt to pass the corner as the sign turns.
Sixth. Use your horn judiciously in warning pedestrians. The average automobile horn has the effect just the opposite of what is desired; it frightens and causes indecision. (more…)
by JD Thomas | Sep 22, 2015
by JD Thomas | Sep 22, 2015
The Journal of American Folklore is an amazing resource. It is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Folklore Society. The journal has been published since the society’s founding in 1888. It comes out on a quarterly schedule and incorporates scholarly articles, essays, and other content related to folklore in the US and around the world.
Many individual articles have been digitized and indexed as part of the Early Journal Content project on JSTOR making them “Free to Anyone in the World.” They make up some of the nearly 500,000 scholarly works digitized and made freely available to everyone by JSTOR.
This collection was submitted by Mr. A.J. Ritchie and were published in the April 1898 issue of the journal.
Omens of Bad Luck
- Boots or shoes raised off the floor or ground.
- Placing the feet on the table.
- Walking over white flag-stones.
- Walking under a bridge or ladder.
- Walking under an elevated railroad when the train is passing over.
- In removing, to clean the room or house you leave.
- To kill a spider.
- To find a spider in your room in the morning.
- To meet a cross-eyed person first in the morning. (Bad luck for the day.)
- To carry ink about or spill ink.
For a woman to meet a red-haired woman early in the day.- For a man to meet a red-haired man early in the day.
- To have a woman as a caller first on Monday morning.
- To have a flock of crows fly over your head.
- To hand salt to another person. (Bad luck to the other person.)
- After sitting down to the table, to change your place.
- In dressing, to put on any article of clothing inside out.
- To stub the left toe.
- To be born under certain stars known as unlucky stars.
- To turn a bed on Sunday.
- To use poplar in any piece of furniture in a house or camp, or for a lumberman to snub his raft to a poplar.
- To look into a mirror before retiring.
- To find a horseshoe pointing away from you.
- For a cock to crow in the evening.
- To go directly through a house without stopping or sitting down.
- To meet an old woman.
- To find a five-leaved clover.
- To see the moon first through glass.
- To have a gentleman with a flat foot call on New Year’s Day.
- Not to kill the first snake you see in the season.
- For a strange cat to come to the house.
- For a preacher and a white horse to travel in the same steamer.
- To meet a lean pig.
- On finding a cricket in your room at night, to kill it.
(more…)
by JD Thomas | Sep 20, 2015
The question: Should Students Have to Wear School Uniforms? is alive and well in America today. The adoption of uniforms by public schools is on the rise in many parts of the United States.
Schools with a student body consisting of 50% or more non-white kids are four times more likely to require uniform dress than schools with a minority base of 20-49% and twenty-four times more likely than a school with a white student population of 81-95%.
By 2008, 22 states had laws in place allowing local schools to decide on the issue of uniforms for students.
Early in 1913 this question was being debated in the city of Seattle, Washington – but only for girls.
Dress School Girls All Alike?
Shall Seattle put its high school girls a uniform dress?
Miss Ruth Shank thinks her simple dress should be adopted by all high school girls.
A retiring the school board recently proposed it. The Federated women’s club has taken the matter up in discussion. Teachers in the schools favor the idea. Mothers have varying opinions.
In our grandmothers day it was not actually understood that the matter of dress might have a good deal of effect on the work of a high school girl or that it in any way affected her morals. Neither was understood that adenoids, removable by a simple and almost painless operation, made a dunce of a really smart child, or that scientific ventilation facilitated the work of students.
Ruth Shank, a pupil at Lincoln high school, is a disciple of simplicity in dress.
“I believe,” she said, “high school girls are trying to be more simple in their dress. They don’t wear loud or flashy clothes any more. But I think they should be even more simple. A uniform dress might be just the thing.”
An investigation in the New York schools have revealed the fact that many pupils are retarded to their studies because of petty jealousies aroused in matters of dress. Boys too, they say, pay too much attention to gaily the dressed girls.
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by JD Thomas | Sep 18, 2015
In the early 1920’s the United States Public Health Service section on Public Health Education supplied a daily health column, “Uncle Sam, M. D.,” for publication in newspapers throughout the country.
Combined with a system of questions and answers; the column supplied news on health matters two or three times a week to 10,000 newspapers, periodicals, and organizations. It also supplied health articles to the Foreign Information Bureau and produced motion-picture films to build a stereopticon loan library.
It was mostly newspapers in the west that carried the column. The easiest to find are The Bismark Tribune and The Ogden Standard-Examiner.
One of the longest installments is one of my favorites. It appeared in April 1920.
Public health
If you want better health, pay the price. Money spent in protecting the health and the likes the people is the best of all investments. Don’t be too eager to pass more health laws; provide sufficient means enforce those already on the statute books.
It is a well-known axiom that public health is, within certain limits, a purchasable commodity, and that each community practically fixes by its sanitary policy its sickness and disease rates from such preventable diseases as typhoid fever, malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, etc. The best indication of the adequate or inadequacy with which a community is handling his health problems is shown in the ability of the existing health organization to lessen the prevalence of sickness.
In the interests of economy and efficiency, for instance, all sanitary work, be it child hygiene, industrial sanitation, school hygiene, milk control, etc, should be centralized and coordinated under properly equipped departments of health. Local health administration must be strengthened by the employment of health officers giving their entire time to their duty and fully responsible to the state department of health. The public health service holds that at least 2% of the public revenue should be spent for sanitary work, since for no other expenditures is so much profit ultimately derived.
(more…)
Second. Stay clear of the car tracks and you’ll save tires as well as the tempers of those in the trolley behind. Remember that the track
The wonderful work of archivists have preserved far more material than we usually see. Our goal here is to unearth and present some of the stuff we never saw in school.