• The Ghost Girls

    From its discovery in 1898, radium was considered a wonder of science.  It glowed with an unearthly beauty.  It delighted its discoverers, Marie Sklodowska Curie and her husband Pierre, who called it “My beautiful radium”.  It was used in spas and clinics as a cure for everything from cancer to constipation.   It was used in makeup, jewelry and paints.   At the height of World War I, it was used to make the hands and dials of wristwatches glow in the dark.  Girls all over the country flocked to make these watches as they paid up to three times what they could have been paid at any other wartime factory.…

  • The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811

    New Madrid, Missouri was at the back end of nowhere.  It was technically a respectably sized town on the Mississippi River between St. Louis and Natchez, but this was not a great achievement.  In 1811, the population was about 1,000 people made up of farmers, fur traders and pioneers supplemented by French Creoles and Native Americans traveling on the great river.  However, the events there beginning in 1811 shook the world.  Literally. Related posts: September 11 Memorial and Museum USS Indianapolis – July 1945 The State of Franklin The Great Fire of 1910

  • The Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635

    Hurricanes are a part of life if you live on the Eastern Seaboard or Gulf Coast of the US or the Caribbean. What we tend to forget is these powerful storms have been around longer than the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. We discussed a few such hurricane in our posts about the 1900 Galveston Storm (Please see this post for more information:http://www.historynaked.com/great-storm-1900-galveston-hur…/ ) and one that destroyed the young city of New Orleans (Please see this post for more information: http://www.historynaked.com/founding-of-new-orleans/ ). There was even a hurricane that possibly stopped Washington DC from burning in 1814 (Please see this post for more information:http://www.historynaked.com/white-house-white-house-white/ ) However, hurricanes have been plaguing the…

  • Herald of Free Enterprise

    Today is going to be a fairly short one; it was an event that remains within recent living memory for most of us, over a certain age. And it focuses on a tragedy that resonates deeply with me personally to this day. As a teenager, I traveled several times on the cross-channel ferries between England and France and Belgium in my ongoing research of the Great War, as a young amateur Historian. (It was on those journeys that I got to know Phoebe.) Those journeys were for the most part made on the three specially built Spirit-Class vessels that operated between the home ports and those of mainland Europe. I…

  • Fire at the Cocoanut Grove

    Boston did not technically have nightclubs, but one of the hottest places to be in 1942 was the Cocoanut Grove.  It was a supper club located on near Park Square, which was built in 1927.  It kind of fell out of favor after Prohibition, but with the advent of World War II it began to pick up in popularity again.  Barnett Welansky, became owner of the Cocoanut Grove in February 1933 and he brought in a prominent Boston interior designer to make the club more family oriented.  Palm trees, blue satin ceilings and a dance floor were added.  The first floor had a dining room and a ballroom with a…