February 10, 2010
Funny, I didn’t even know there was a championship for bridge jumping. But before you get too excited, our fearless acrobat didn’t jump over bridges, he jumped off them. Steve Brodie (1863–1901) was a bookmaker in Brooklyn that had a real flair for self-promotion, claiming to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge on July 23, [...]
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February 8, 2010
This lithograph from 1898 isn’t just busy, it’s also big, measuring over twenty feet in length. At the time, the festivities shown on this poster looked like a day of fun, but today would surely have liability lawyers sharpening their knives. The original, in the Library of Congress, has been assembled from a number of [...]
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