John Singer Sargent was somewhat of a rarity, having achieved recognition and success as an artist during his lifetime. He was controversial as an artist- known for realism in a period when experimental forms like impressionism and cubism were in vogue. He was an intriguing person, intensely private, and almost a man without country. But his prodigious body of work is, above all, a stunning record of the time in which he lived.
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.
The 1927 Coverdale Mine Brinks Armored Car robbery was a particularly violent episode in the particularly violent era.
In 1933 a farmer named Ed Carlson walked into a laboratory at the University of Wisconsin and asked a simple question- what was killing his cattle? The answer to that question would earn the university millions of dollars, and revolutionize the fields of both medicine and vermin extermination. The strange story of warfarin deserves to be remembered.