A blog about food, history, food charts, and more. (Formerly Mental Masala)
If you love Thanksgiving, you should learn the name Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879). Starting in 1846 and continuing until her retirement in 1877, Hale used her position as editress of Godey’s Lady’s Book and Magazine — one of the most popular and influential magazines of the time — to campaign for a national Thanksgiving holiday in […]
I was out walking the other day, and it was hot, so I was really feeling the collar. As I rounded the corner onto Kings Lane, I spotted my old crony George. And so I says to him, “I’m headed to the Lion’s Pub, why don’t you come and have a pickle?” Once we got […]
Updated below After my review of The Box and my port mapping exercise, I thought I’d sail back into port and unload a few port-related charts. The first shows the growth of three big West Coast ports: Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland. As international trade has expanded and the container shipping industry has become […]
Not finding a satisfactory history of the evolution of Wilshire Boulevard in Kevin Roderick’s Wilshire Boulevard book, I searched for old maps to find the answers (my review of Roderick’s Wilshire Boulevard book). The Los Angeles Past blog led me to the 1897 edition of Maxwell’s Los Angeles City Directory at the California Digital Library […]
Preface: For various reasons, the images in this post (which are ’embeds’ from Google’s Ngram Viewer) might not going to look quite right — there will be spillover across the right boundary and spacing will be quirky. To see higher quality versions of the charts, click on the chart and it will appear all by […]
The mid-18th century was the “golden age” of whaling in America, with hundreds of ships making long voyages – often into uncharted parts of the oceans – to kill whales and process them into key ingredients of the Industrial Revolution: oil to illuminate homes, offices, streets and factories at night; and lubrication for machines. Candles […]