Long before paranormal investigators filled modern mysteries, writers were already sending detectives (professional and amateur) into haunted houses and other places to look for supernatural evidence. Here are fifteen classic supernatural detective books and stories that I find as unsettling as anything written today. The investigators track down ghosts, vampires, and various other forces that…
Mary Miles Minter, Her Mother, and the Taylor Murder: What the 1923 Interviews Show Minter spoke to the press in August 1923 because she was preparing to sue her mother over her film earnings. By August 10 she had announced a claim against Charlotte Shelby for an accounting of more than $1,000,000; on the 14th…
L’Ange des projections lumineuses (The Angel of Luminous Projections) was an illustrated French monthly publication devoted to teaching the Catholic faith with magic-lantern slides. These slides were made of glass and were projected using devices with lenses and an intense light source—an oil or alcohol lamp, acetylene, limelight or an electric arc. The value of…
When I wrote my profile of the dancer Nyota Inyoka, I left one question hanging. Florenz Ziegfeld saw her dance in Paris in the summer of 1922, brought her to New York, and announced that he was putting her in the Ziegfeld Follies. Did she ever actually appear? She did not. Variety reported it twice,…
A flapper was a young woman of the 1920s who cut her hair short, raised her hemline, and refused the manners her mother was raised on. That definition holds for the later 1920s. It is not what the word meant when Americans first took it up: in 1916 a flapper was a schoolgirl, roughly twelve…
Alfred Cheney Johnston’s photographs often travel the internet without authentic provenance. A print is scanned, the scan is pinned and reposted, and somewhere along the way a name is attached to it, but the name might well be wrong. Once a wrong caption is in circulation it is nearly impossible to recall. This page is…
When the prominent American psychologist G. Stanley Hall died in April 1924, The New York Times remembered him days later under an unusual headline: “Dr. G. Stanley Hall Studied the Flapper’s Personality.” The article devoted substantial attention not to Hall’s place among the founders of American psychology, but to an essay of his about the…
Sixteen forgotten silent film stars — overlooked actresses of the 1910s and 1920s, from Ziegfeld beauties to serial queens — once among the most famous women in America.
Alfred Cheney Johnston photographed the Ziegfeld Follies for a dozen years. His studio method, his letters, his failures, and why his pictures outlived him.
Salomania was the Salome dance craze that swept American and European stages between 1907 and the mid-1920s.