Making History Relevant- and it always is.

What’s in a Name? A whole lot, it seems. This photo is of the Guaranteed Pure Milk Company of Montreal delivery truck. From the McCord Museum set on Flickr creative commons.

Hmm. I’ve long known of this company, I think they had a giant milk bottle erection of sorts in southwest Montreal. Maybe they still do. But I never thought of why a company had to have such a clumsy name. They chose the name because at the beginning of the 1900′s milk was contaminated, and so was water. In the city, especially. And it was a huge problem, especially with respect to Infant Mortality.

In Richmond, a Dr. Boast had one of the milk concessions. In 1909, there was a typhoid epidemic in Montreal, and from what I can see, it was first blamed on milk and then on the water.

Now, it’s Easter weekend and it’s going to be hot, 25 or more, July weather at the beginning of April. I don’t really feel like editing my first chapter of Flo in the City: A work in progress about a girl coming of age in the pivotal 1910 era based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/.

Indeed, yesterday, I forgot all about it and watched Duck Soup. Funny stuff, as everyone knows.

Today, I took a look at some pictures on Flickr creative commons about News in the 1910′s from the Library of Congress collection. They have posted over 5,000 pics from the Bain Collection and I went through a few hundred. What did I learn? That in the 1910′s the news was much like today, focusing on certain types of stories and leaving out the rest: I guess that’s why the suffragists had to become suffragettes, or they could not have been noticed.

I see lots of coverage of baseball, boxing, and society and royalty. A few feel good stories about the problems of the day, orphans being brought for a day out at Coney Island, girls behing rehabilitated on a Mrs. Belmont’s farm.

Just like today, people didn’t want to know about the social problems of the day, I found one picture of a beggar women on the New York Streets.

That makes the underlining theme of Tighsolas, women’s lives in 1910, all the more interesting.

That Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire may have taken place in New Jersey, but I like it as a focal point for my Flo in the City story. It ties into today, and that’s key to my novel, that what I talk has relevance to modern women.

The Nicholsons made their own shirtwaits (blouses)but cheap blouses were being made available to the middle class, and they were cheap because cheap underaged labour was used to make them. Today, we have cheap clothing too, have you noticed. Piles of it. Who is making these clothes? No doubt some young women who are just as badly off as the women in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. La plus ca change, really and truly. And not only that, these piles of cheap clothes take a toll on the environment.