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When Everything Hung By A Thread

March 2023
1min read

The business boom in the post-Civil War decades spawned an arresting advertising device fully as charming as it was effective—the trade or premium card. Given away by merchants, usually to the children of customers, they were welcomed into the American home for their bright lithographed color and their depictions of the newest developments in an age of rapid change. Many families even saved their favorites in scrapbooks. These thread industry cards are from the collection of Samuel Rosenberg.

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Stories published from "October 1957"

Authored by: John Stuart Martin

While panic gripped the nation in 1893, Grover Cleveland suffered his own secret ordeal on a yacht in Long Island Sound.

Authored by: The Editors

Physician treated Cleveland, F.D.R.

Authored by: Leonard V. Huber

Nicholas Roosevelt’s fire canoe transformed the Mississippi.

Authored by: George F. Scheer

General Washington wanted Benedict Arnold taken alive, right in the heart of British-held New York.

Authored by: Paul Horgan

In the wild Southwest, Archbishop Lamy of Santa Fe contended with savage Indians, ignorance, and a recalcitrant clergy.

Authored by: Marshall Sprague

Even when death struck suddenly, the starry-eyed Indian agent was still dreaming of turning his Ute wards into white men overnight.

Authored by: Thomas F. Mcgann

The great historian who so eloquently described the taking of Mexico and Peru won a great private victory of his own in the quiet of his study on Beacon Hill.

Authored by: Morton M. Hunt

The river that disappointed him bears his name, but Alexander Mackenzie’s great achievement in slogging to the Pacific is now almost forgotten.

Professing humanitarian motives, he gave gangsters a word for their artillery and the world its first practicable machine gun.

Authored by: Marshall B. Davidson

In five dramatic allegorical paintings, Thomas Cole echoed the fear of Americans, over a century ago, that all civilizations, our own included, must someday perish.

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