The Round-Up: January 2025
A monthly miscellany of interesting links and tidbits
Ryan B. Anderson at Echoes From An Old Hollow Tree absolutely hits the nail on this head with this post on the death of America’s small towns. It’s a topic I’ve thought about a lot, and this is one of the first times I’ve seen it so clearly articulated. I added my own two cents’ worth of thoughts in a note here, on how I think the root cause goes even further back than the last few generations.
Here’s a piece from Bob Candland on a lesser-known Old West incident: an attempted robbery and gunfight in Campo, California in 1875. Chalk up another example alongside Northfield, Coffeyville, et al of an outlaw gang being routed by average citizens!
One of my hobbies is working on my family tree, and I’ve always had fun with the amateur detective work of digging through old documents, records, and newspaper archives for clues to the missing links—so I enjoyed reading this story of a similar hunt from Chris Dalla Riva: Did Frank Sinatra Really Perform at My Grandma’s High School? (fyi: brief quoted profanity)
On a similar note, I was recently poking about in old local newspapers because I was curious to see whether and when Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show had ever visited my hometown. (The answer: yes, approximately twenty times.) While I was at it I found an amusing item about an earlier Wild West performance: in 1872, a troupe of Mexican vaqueros gave a demonstration in Troy, New York’s Rensselaer Park, and the reporter for the Troy Daily Whig who recorded the event sounded slightly unimpressed and distinctly Eastern about the whole thing.
An interesting post from Anthony Esolen on the roots of the word “farmer.” No, I did not know that that is where the English name “George” derives from!
This is pretty neat: a trip through fashion history in a Twitter thread on First Ladies’ inauguration attire, from Abigail Adams on up. It’s interesting that up until about the mid-20th century, each gown is a distinctive example of the fashion from its particular decade, but from, say, the 1950s onward both the coats and evening gowns might have been worn interchangeably in any decade of the late 20th century.
Some football fun: when it snows during a soccer match, the usual practice is to switch to a brightly-colored ball. However, during a match in Scotland in 1995, the orange ball burst during the game, so it was necessary to return to the standard white ball. The players could see it, but the TV cameras couldn't, and the resulting footage is perfection.
And in case you missed it, this month’s flash fiction piece (continuing the inadvertent old newspaper theme here!):
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