Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s
History-Making Race around the World by Matthew Goodman.
Ballantine Books, 2013. 449 pages.
History and Travel
HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY—NOVEMBER 14, 1889
Wending our way across the crowded dock, we glimpse a young woman in a plaid coat and cap, neither tall nor short, dark nor fair,
not quite pretty enough to turn a head: the sort of woman who could, if
necessary, lose her face in a crowd. Nellie
Bly, plucky reporter for Joseph Pullitzer’s World newspaper, boards the
German steamship Augusta Victoria and begins an east-bound quest to
break the record for fastest trip around the world. She clutches a single painstakingly-packed bag and carries two self-winding watches, one... set into a leather band on her
wrist... to be adjusted to the local time as she traveled, and the other snug
in her pocket... a beautiful gold-plated 24-hour watch, which, in anticipation
of her return, would remain set to New York time.
 |
| Elizabeth Bisland, circa 1891 |
Departing from New York City that same day—but chasing
the western horizon by train—is a young writer from The Cosmopolitan
magazine, Elizabeth Bisland: genteel,
aristocratic, lovely to behold. Miss Bisland prefers
romantic poetry to newspaper prose. In defiance of Victorian odds, however, and much like
Nellie Bly, she has crafted a creditable career in the male-centric milieu
of late nineteenth-century metropolitan journalism.
 |
| Le Tour du Monde en 80 Jours |
Inspired by Jules Verne’s 1873 classic
Around the World in 80 Days, Nellie and Elizabeth aspire to trump fictional adventurer Phileas Fogg by circumnavigating the globe in something less than
quatre-vingts jours. Their dramatic race will cover twenty-eight
thousand miles, capture the national imagination, and change their
lives forever. We're just along for the ride. Alternately following the two journalists, we traverse storm-tossed oceans and snow-drifted mountains. We explore the exotic back alleys of Hong
Kong and the sultry grounds of a Ceylon tea plantation. We rush through London, and we rest in Yokohama.
 |
| Round the World with Nellie Bly, circa 1890 |
We are struck by the elasticity
of time in a time before technologies demanded synchronization: In Pittsburgh the train station had six
clocks, and each one showed a different time. When a clock struck noon in Washington, D.C., the time was 12:08 in
Philadelphia, 12:12 in New York, and 12:24 in Boston. But the times are
a-changin’. With frenetic departures and nail-biting arrivals, Eighty Days describes a quickening temporal culture. Bisland realizes at the end of a trip ruled by the calendar and the
clock, time seemed... to slow, and even run backward, carrying her ever farther
from her goal.
Let's shadow author Matthew Goodman across the nineteenth-century timeline for a stretch:
The Sun and
the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists,
and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman.
Basic
Books, 2008. 350 pages.
History
and Travel
NEW
YORK—AUGUST 26, 1835
At a time
when clocks run slow or fast, if at all, in the historical moment when New York City balances on the brink of economic preeminence and cultural luminosity, upstart penny
paper the Sun receives a zany circulation boost when it publishes six articles supporting claims of life on Earth's so-far-away moon.
 |
| Lithograph from the Sun, August 1835 |
Turns out, nothing sells papers to working-class consumers like far-fetched accounts
of upright-walking beavers, downright-prancing unicorns, and four-foot-tall man-bats
flitting and flying across a whimsical lunar landscape! In no time at all, one sensational story sequence transforms America into a nation of enthusiastic newspaper readers—and the Sun into the most widely read periodical in
the nineteenth-century world.
Speaking of zany circulation boosts....
The Murder
of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the
Tabloid Wars by Paul Collins.
NEW YORK—JUNE 26, 1897
Now it's time to insert an authentic nineteenth-century exclamatory phrase into our blog post: Sakes Alive, this story beats the Dutch! On bucolic Long Island, a farmer blunders upon a duck pond tinged red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two youths espy an oilcloth-encased human torso bobbing in the river. On the outskirts of Harlem, blueberry pickers stumble upon smartly-severed limbs discarded in a ditch. Gruesome clues to a grisly crime, scattered about the city.
In less than a New York minute, we are embroiled in an extraordinary murder mystery, immersed in the mythos and machinations of Gilded Age
America. Prodded by dueling newspaper
magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, we find ourselves one with
the ceaseless rabble, filing into Jefferson Market Courthouse, a misplaced Gothic castle, its bands of red and tan
brick spiraling over the Sixth Avenue El and up into the great crenellated
clock tower. Inside, we watch a compelling, if circumstantial, case unfold. A scandalous love triangle. A creatively disseminated
body. A practically unidentifiable victim. A defense claim that the victim isn’t
even dead.
And so we insert another authentic nineteenth-century exclamatory phrase into our blog post: Man Alive! This is lively writing about a Man Not-Alive! Hold on to those nineteenth-century pocketwatches. It's time for:
A
Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York by Timothy J.
Gilfoyle.
The
child of Irish and Chinese immigrants, young George trawls the sidewalks of Five
Points and Chinatown, picking pockets for pocket money, smoking his profit away in
opium dens, and journeying through the bohemian underbelly of the nineteenth-century city. Inevitably, Appo runs afoul of the law, serving time in a shipboard reform school and in
various infamous correctional institutions: the Tombs, Sing Sing, and the Matteawan
State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he enjoys a curious reunion with
his father, a fellow inmate.
Appo’s world is populated by juvenile delinquents, opium aficionados, mob hooligans, smooth-talking swindlers, green-goods schemers, crooked politicians, Machiavellian shysters, and evangelical crusaders. Appo, meanwhile, is a quintessential good fellow, a criminal type who relies upon deception and wile, all the while adhering to a curious underworld code of etiquette and behavior. Good times for the good fellow? Swiping pocket watches, especially when he finds a local fence and sells both the watch and chain for $50. Bad times for the good fellow? Learning in a courtroom setting that his victim is Pedro Del Valle... the Ambassador for Mexico who values his lost property at $360. Time served in the Big House? Priceless.
Enfolded in the oppressive heat and humidity of an East Coast summer and ensnared by the ominous watches and warnings of the Weather Channel app for iPad, we decide it's time for a nineteenth-century storm story....
Manhunt:
The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson.
Tick-tock. It is 7:20
A.M., April 15, 1865. The doctors and nearly every man in the room pull out pocket watches on gold chains... At 7:21 and 55 seconds, Abraham Lincoln draws
his last breath.
The greatest manhunt in American history is on. For almost two weeks, John Wilkes Booth confounds Union cavalry and detectives, leading them on a tempestuous chase across a cross-section of Civil-War staggered countryside: down the dirt streets of Washington, D.C., through the marshy marshlands of Maryland, and into the woodland wilds of Virginia. Manhunt offers a gripping hour-by-hour account of the search for John Wilkes Booth, revealed from the perspectives of the pursued and the pursuers, full of narrative twists, turns of fate, and nineteenth-century clock references.
GARRETT FARM, VIRGINIA-- April
26, 1865
We are standing with National Detective Police Lieutenant Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, commissioned by the Secretary of War to track down Lincoln’s killer. Baker, counting down the minutes on his pocket watch, bellows to Booth that he is running out of time. Only five minutes more, and hetorch the barn! Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock: sounds like time is up for John Wilkes Booth.
Speaking of the vagaries of place and time-- and of presidents in the right place at the wrong time....
Led by illustrious Dr. Willard
Bliss, expert in ballistic trauma and eschewer of basic antiseptic theory, a parade of medical practitioners probe the wound, administer primitive
treatments, and fatally exacerbate the problem.
As Garfield suffers stoically through the seasonal swelter, telephone inventor
Alexander Graham Bell races against nineteenth-century time, developing a contraption
capable of locating the wayward bullet. He
transports his induction balance to the president’s sickbed at the White House,
but the device fails. Everyone in the
room blames meddling metal presidential bed springs for the malfunction; however, subsequent historical speculation outside the room suggests that the detector might have worked if
Dr. Bliss had delegated authority and allowed Bell to use the induction
balance on Garfield’s left side as well as his right side.
Tick-tock, tick-tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. The clock had run out, and there was simply nothing more Bell could do.
Just look at the time! We haven't been watching our twenty-first century digital clocks or checking our nineteenth-century pocketwatches, blithely tripping the nineteenth-century timeline instead. History and narrative nonfiction: we pick this stuff up, and we can’t put it down. It's Summer 2013, and we are reading in the right place, about the right time.
Speaking of zany circulation boosts....
Crown,
2011. 325 pages
History
and TravelNEW YORK—JUNE 26, 1897
Now it's time to insert an authentic nineteenth-century exclamatory phrase into our blog post: Sakes Alive, this story beats the Dutch! On bucolic Long Island, a farmer blunders upon a duck pond tinged red with blood. On the Lower East Side, two youths espy an oilcloth-encased human torso bobbing in the river. On the outskirts of Harlem, blueberry pickers stumble upon smartly-severed limbs discarded in a ditch. Gruesome clues to a grisly crime, scattered about the city.
 |
| Jefferson Market Courthouse, 1897 |
And so we insert another authentic nineteenth-century exclamatory phrase into our blog post: Man Alive! This is lively writing about a Man Not-Alive! Hold on to those nineteenth-century pocketwatches. It's time for:
W.W.
Norton & Company, 2007. 480 pages.
Nonfiction and Biographies
NEW YORK-- APRIL 1, 1882
I started to pick pockets again... standing at St. Paul's Church on Broadway and Fulton Street... I noticed a very refined looking man, wearing plenty of diamonds and a heavy gold chain... I stepped beside him and took his watch and chain without him knowing his loss. Tick-tocket, tick-tocket, tick-tocket. Beware of George Appo, nineteenth-century pickpocket. His life story forms the foundation of this well-researched social history of sketchy characters and criminal culture in Gilded Age Gotham.
 |
| Sing Sing, wood engraving, 1855 |
Appo’s world is populated by juvenile delinquents, opium aficionados, mob hooligans, smooth-talking swindlers, green-goods schemers, crooked politicians, Machiavellian shysters, and evangelical crusaders. Appo, meanwhile, is a quintessential good fellow, a criminal type who relies upon deception and wile, all the while adhering to a curious underworld code of etiquette and behavior. Good times for the good fellow? Swiping pocket watches, especially when he finds a local fence and sells both the watch and chain for $50. Bad times for the good fellow? Learning in a courtroom setting that his victim is Pedro Del Valle... the Ambassador for Mexico who values his lost property at $360. Time served in the Big House? Priceless.
Enfolded in the oppressive heat and humidity of an East Coast summer and ensnared by the ominous watches and warnings of the Weather Channel app for iPad, we decide it's time for a nineteenth-century storm story....
The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin.
Harper Perennial, 2004. 307 pages.
History and Travel
SOMEWHERE ON THE GREAT PLAINS-- JANUARY 12, 1888
Out of nowhere, a soot gray cloud appeared over the northwest horizon... Montana fell before dawn; North Dakota went while farmers were out doing their early morning chores; South Dakota, during morning recess; Nebraska as school clocks rounded toward dismissal. In three minutes the front subtracted 18 degrees from the air’s temperature. Timing is everything, and timing is what makes this storm so deadly: its sudden appearance during an otherwise mundane work and school day in the wake of a deceptive January thaw.
Scores of impoverished Northern European homesteaders had been promised that the Great Plains offered land, freedom, and hope. In January 1888, they get a blizzard for the ages: howling wind, lethal cold, and disorienting powdery snow. Winter in the American Heartland is not a wonderland, but a cruel, pitiless landscape governed by meteorological forces that defy comprehension and control. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock... the world changes in just three minutes.
Ah, the vagaries of place and time. Our sixteenth president, the man who leads a nation through its great nineteenth-century military and moral crisis-- a definitive leader for a defining moment-- ultimately finds himself in the right theater box at the very wrong time.
Harper Perennial, 2004. 307 pages.
History and Travel
SOMEWHERE ON THE GREAT PLAINS-- JANUARY 12, 1888
Out of nowhere, a soot gray cloud appeared over the northwest horizon... Montana fell before dawn; North Dakota went while farmers were out doing their early morning chores; South Dakota, during morning recess; Nebraska as school clocks rounded toward dismissal. In three minutes the front subtracted 18 degrees from the air’s temperature. Timing is everything, and timing is what makes this storm so deadly: its sudden appearance during an otherwise mundane work and school day in the wake of a deceptive January thaw.
Scores of impoverished Northern European homesteaders had been promised that the Great Plains offered land, freedom, and hope. In January 1888, they get a blizzard for the ages: howling wind, lethal cold, and disorienting powdery snow. Winter in the American Heartland is not a wonderland, but a cruel, pitiless landscape governed by meteorological forces that defy comprehension and control. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock... the world changes in just three minutes.
Ah, the vagaries of place and time. Our sixteenth president, the man who leads a nation through its great nineteenth-century military and moral crisis-- a definitive leader for a defining moment-- ultimately finds himself in the right theater box at the very wrong time.
William
Morrow, 2006. 448 pages.
Nonfiction
and Biographies
WASHINGTON,
D.C.—APRIL 14, 1865
Tick-tock. A confederate sympathizer, a
celebrated stage actor, broods on the front step of Ford’s Theater. Whoever told John Wilkes
Booth about the president’s theater plans unknowingly activated in his mind an
imaginary clock, one that is ticking down, minute by minute. Hours later, syllables being spoken onstage
sounded no longer like words to the soon-to-be notorious villain lurking in
the playhouse shadows, but like the last ticks of a dying clock winding down.
The greatest manhunt in American history is on. For almost two weeks, John Wilkes Booth confounds Union cavalry and detectives, leading them on a tempestuous chase across a cross-section of Civil-War staggered countryside: down the dirt streets of Washington, D.C., through the marshy marshlands of Maryland, and into the woodland wilds of Virginia. Manhunt offers a gripping hour-by-hour account of the search for John Wilkes Booth, revealed from the perspectives of the pursued and the pursuers, full of narrative twists, turns of fate, and nineteenth-century clock references.
 |
| Garrett Farm, date unknown |
We are standing with National Detective Police Lieutenant Colonel Lafayette C. Baker, commissioned by the Secretary of War to track down Lincoln’s killer. Baker, counting down the minutes on his pocket watch, bellows to Booth that he is running out of time. Only five minutes more, and hetorch the barn! Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock: sounds like time is up for John Wilkes Booth.
Speaking of the vagaries of place and time-- and of presidents in the right place at the wrong time....
Destiny of
the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by
Candice Millard.
Doubleday, 2011. 339 pages.
Nonfiction and Biographies
WASHINGTON, D.C.—JULY 2, 1881
Time, perhaps, has obscured the view, but from our vantage point, James Abram Garfield stands as one of the most exceptional men ever elected president. He ascends from humble beginnings to become a prodigious scholar, a venerated war hero, a prominent politician, a dedicated reformist. Nominated for president against his will, Garfield engages in vigorous political combat with corrupt powers-that-be following his election. Just four months after his inauguration, unhinged office-seeker Charles J. Guiteau stalks the vacation-bound president to the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station and shoots him from behind at point-blank range. Miraculously, the shot doesn’t kill Garfield. He is returned to the White House and ensconced in a dark, uncomfortable, summer-stuffy sickroom.
Doubleday, 2011. 339 pages.
Nonfiction and Biographies
WASHINGTON, D.C.—JULY 2, 1881
Time, perhaps, has obscured the view, but from our vantage point, James Abram Garfield stands as one of the most exceptional men ever elected president. He ascends from humble beginnings to become a prodigious scholar, a venerated war hero, a prominent politician, a dedicated reformist. Nominated for president against his will, Garfield engages in vigorous political combat with corrupt powers-that-be following his election. Just four months after his inauguration, unhinged office-seeker Charles J. Guiteau stalks the vacation-bound president to the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station and shoots him from behind at point-blank range. Miraculously, the shot doesn’t kill Garfield. He is returned to the White House and ensconced in a dark, uncomfortable, summer-stuffy sickroom.
 |
| Find the Bullet, Harper's Weekly 1881 |
Tick-tock, tick-tock. Tick. Tock. Tick. The clock had run out, and there was simply nothing more Bell could do.
Just look at the time! We haven't been watching our twenty-first century digital clocks or checking our nineteenth-century pocketwatches, blithely tripping the nineteenth-century timeline instead. History and narrative nonfiction: we pick this stuff up, and we can’t put it down. It's Summer 2013, and we are reading in the right place, about the right time.
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