The autumn of 1821 saw the opening of two pioneering educational institutions: the Troy Female Seminary, in Troy, New York, and the English Classical School, in Boston. The former is generally called our country’s first secondary school for girls and the latter its first public high school. By showing that girls and the working class were capable of serious academic study, these two institutes led to a broadening of higher education and paved the way for today’s universal compulsory schooling.

The Troy school was run by the formidable Emma Willard, for whom it would be renamed in 1895. Formal education for girls was not unheard of at the time, but the instruction usually stopped at a very basic level. Girls whose families could afford the luxury of further schooling studied such genteel subjects as music, dance, drawing, embroidery, and the like, with perhaps a smattering of French. Willard had taught in academies of this type before her 1809 marriage, and in 1814, with her family in financial distress, she opened one of her own in Middlebury, Vermont.

Willard had become familiar with philosophy, science, and mathematics from a nephew who studied at Middlebury College. After teaching herself from his textbooks, she added these subjects to her curriculum. She also acquired a knowledge of physiology from her husband’s medical books. As her vision for female education grew, she eloquently petitioned New York’s governor to establish a public secondary school for girls that would teach science, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and history in addition to “housewifery” and the other traditional topics (except ornamental needlework, which Willard called a “waste of time”). The requisite state funds were not forthcoming, but in 1821 the citizens of Troy offered a building to house a private school, and in September ninety girls (onethird from Troy, the rest from as far away as Georgia and Ohio) began taking classes.

With course work in everything from zoology to geography to trigonometry to Greek, the seminary was more like a college than a secondary school. Many of its students went on to spread Willard’s educational ideas in schools of their own. By the time of Willard’s death in 1870, her goal of public education for girls had long since been fulfilled, and graduates of her seminary could even go on to higher studies, an option that had seemed outlandish half a century before.

Meanwhile, Boston was taking a first step to eliminate a different barrier to learning. Public secondary education dated back to 1635, when the Boston Latin School was founded, but as the name implies, that institute and its successors were meant for collegebound boys. Students with no use for dead languages had to rely on private or semiprivate boarding schools for instruction beyond the elementary level. The English Classical School (renamed English High School in 1824) was meant to “give a child an education that shall fit him for active life, and shall serve as a foundation for eminence in his profession, whether Mercantile or Mechanical.” Its threeyear curriculum included the usual arts and sciences as well as ethics, metaphysics, surveying, and bookkeeping. French and German were added later. In 1865 a commissioner sent by Britain’s Parliament called Boston’s English “the model school of the United States,” and though private academies still predominated, hundreds of public high schools had sprung up across the country, from Maine to New Orleans to San Francisco—including a few for girls.

On September 23 about fifty Mexican residents of Los Angeles surrounded the small Army garrison there and proclaimed a rebellion against American rule. The episode was the latest twist in a turbulent year for Southern California, which was seeing its fourth ruler (nominally, at least) in as many months. In June a group of filibustering frontiersmen, inflamed by rumors of incipient hostilities, had captured the northern town of Sonoma and claimed the entire territory in the name of the so-called Bear Flag Republic. In July, with war officially declared, regular American naval forces landed at Monterey and made short work of subduing the territory’s ten thousand or so Mexican civilians. “We simply marched all over California, from Sonoma to San Diego, and raised the American flag without protest,” wrote a member of the expedition. “We tried to find an enemy, but could not.”

On August 13 the Americans occupied Los Angeles unopposed. Commodore Robert F. Stockton got on the locals’ good side right away by having his musicians give nightly concerts. As in most of California, the Angelenos’ attachment to their mother country was far from ardent, and after three trouble-free weeks Stockton decided it was safe to return to Monterey, leaving Capt. Archibald Gillespie in charge. That turned out to be a big mistake.

For reasons best known to himself, Gillespie felt a need to clamp down firmly on the nonexistent opposition. He banned public and private gatherings, enforced a curfew, searched houses, and arrested citizens. Even worse, he restricted sales of liquor. Townswomen protested by giving Gillespie a basket of peaches rolled in cactus spines, but he refused to soften his rule. Within weeks Gillespie had worn out his welcome and was facing an angry crowd on his doorstep. His men repulsed the initial riot, but the next day a much larger group of citizens, armed this time, lay siege to their quarters.

A few hundred more troops and some matériel would have greatly strengthened the rebels, who were equipped with smoothbore muskets, homemade gunpowder, and improvised willow lances. But Mexico had little interest in contesting control of California. Its hands were full at home, where the city of Monterrey had just fallen to Gen. Zachary Taylor. The Californio guerrillas made do with their inadequate weapons, which they sometimes supplemented by dragging Americans from their mounts with lassos. They also relied on expert horsemanship, as well as ruses like herding wild horses back and forth in the distance to give the impression of a large cavalry force.

Soon after Gillespie’s garrison was surrounded, though, a daring former trapper named “Lean John” Brown rode north through enemy territory (jumping a thirteen-foot ravine at one point, running twenty-seven miles after his horse dropped dead, and covering more than five hundred miles in less than six days) to bring word to Commodore Stockton. Eventually American forces commanded by Stockton, Maj. John C. Frémont, and Gen. Stephen W. Kearny converged on the area and crushed the revolt. By January 1847 all of California was back in American hands—for good this time.

In the September 5 issue of Harper’s Weekly, the novelist and critic William Dean Howells reported on a visit to Rockaway Beach in Queens. The bathers were rather too numerous for the refined Howells, a self-described “friend of quiet and seclusion” who was clearly out of his element, but otherwise their behavior was exemplary: “The popular joy of our poorer classes is no longer the terror it once was to the peaceful observer. The tough was not visibly present, nor the toughess, either of the pure native East Side stock or of the Celtic extraction; yet there wert large numbers of Americans with rather fewer recognizable Irish among the masses, who were mainly Germans, Russians, Poles, and the Jews of these several nationalities.” While regretting that “you can no longer know citizen and countryman apart by their clothes, still less citizeness and countrywoman,” Howells surmised that the “Americans” came mostly from Long Island while the “foreign-looking folk” were city dwellers.

His demographic survey complete, the paragon of American literature bought a ticket for the shoot-the-chutes but chickened out, deciding instead “to enjoy the pleasure of others in it.” After doing so, he conjectured that “the experience of shooting the chute must comprise the rare transport of a fall from a ten-story building, and the delight of a tempestuous passage of the Atlantic, powerfully condensed.” He also investigated the sideshows, including one with “X-ray apparatus for showing you the inside of your watch,” and found the same combination of fascination and pathos that strikes most modern observers. The account concluded with a culinary note: “Of course there was everywhere soda, and places of the softer drinks abounded.” A note at the end assured anxious readers that Howells’s report would be continued in a later issue.

On Saturday, September 3, Roscoe (“Fatty”) Arbuckle checked into the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. The rotund comedian had just finished filming three features simultaneously and was planning to relax over Labor Day weekend with a pair of friends. On Monday morning Virginia Rappe, an actress who had worked with Arbuckle at Keystone Studios years before, turned up in the hotel lobby. One of Arbuckle’s friends invited her to stop by an ongoing party in their suite, which she did later that day. Arbuckle and friends checked out on Tuesday morning, while Rappe, sick from drinking too much, rested in a separate room. Two days later she was moved to a hospital, where she died at one-thirty the next afternoon.

What had happened between Rappe’s arrival and Arbuckle’s departure immediately became the subject of intense, lurid speculation. A series of sex and drug scandals was coming out of Hollywood, so an aroused public was ready, perhaps eager, to believe the worst.

A medical examination showed that Rappe had died of a ruptured bladder, and many observers familiar with Arbuckle’s girth jumped to vile conclusions. In short order Arbuckle was indicted and tried for manslaughter; his movies were pulled from screens.

Two trials led to hung juries in December and February. At a third trial that spring Arbuckle’s lawyers brought out all manner of seamy facts about Rappe’s past, including numerous abortions, an illegitimate child, and a penchant for tearing her clothes off when drunk. She also had a history of bladder trouble, and at the time of the incident she was pregnant and was suffering from syphilis and an internal abscess. The jury deliberated just six minutes before finding Arbuckle not guilty.

The acquittal could not salvage Arbuckle’s ruined career, however. The tactics that won his case in the courtroom lost it in the press, which reveled in the details of the gin-soaked daytime pajama party with loose women. The movie industry’s Hays Office, recently established to counter Hollywood’s immoral image, banned Arbuckle from acting in April 1922. Though the ban was rescinded in December of that year, the studios were frightened and not one of them would touch the tainted star.

Arbuckle’s ordeal, while painful, did not leave him a broken man. He still had many friends in the industry who believed in his innocence, and he continued to work as a director, sometimes uncredited and sometimes under a pseudonym. He also acted on the stage and in vaudeville, crossing paths with such future stars as Bob Hope, Humphrey Bogart, Milton Berle, and Shemp Howard. (Another luminary associated with Arbuckle was the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett, who worked for his defense team as a Pinkerton detective.)

In one vaudeville skit a woman asked Arbuckle if he could tell her how to get into the movies, to which he replied, “Pardon me, young lady, but can you tell me how to get into the movies?”

But the fact is that, besides writing and directing, Arbuckle actually did manage to make a few brief onscreen appearances in the 1920s. In 1932, with memory of the scandal fading, he signed to appear in three comedy shorts for Warner Bros. He had just completed the last one when he died in his sleep of a heart attack on June 29, 1933.

On September 13 a force of nearly fifteen hundred state and local police, corrections officers, and National Guardsmen stormed New York’s Attica State Correctional Facility, forty miles east of Buffalo. Holed up inside were about a thousand inmates who had taken over Cellblock D to protest a variety of restrictive rules and policies.

In the immediate aftermath of the inmates’ takeover four days before, early developments had been encouraging. Officials agreed to most of the prisoners’ demands were dropped. Observers reported that the more than thirty guards and employees taken hostage were being treated well. But two days into the occupation, a guard who had been injured in the initial struggle died; some reports said that he had been thrown from a second-story window.

From then on, positions hardened. Inmates refused to budge from their demand for complete amnesty, which state officials would not consider. Gov. Nelson Rockefeller declined requests to come to Attica and direct negotiations in person. After another two days, the troopers moved in.

The result was horrific. By the time the prison was secured, thirty-nine men lay dead or mortally wounded—ten of them hostages, the rest inmates. The toll was the greatest in any prison riot in American history. The next day’s news brought another shocker. The dead hostages had not had their throats cut by inmates, as initially reported; instead they had died of gunshot wounds—friendly fire from their intended rescuers.

As the families of the victims buried their dead, politicians of all stripes rushed to deflect the blame onto their favorite targets. Commissions and committees beyond number rehashed the tragedy and came up with approaches that might have worked better—safely so, since the outcome could hardly have been worse. Some urged greater freedom for prisoners, while others said the uprising showed they had too much freedom already. In the quartercentury since Attica, many penological reforms have been enacted. A complete solution to the problem, however, inevitably conflicts with the ineradicable penchant of convicts to revolt and public reluctance to spend money on improving prison conditions.