1896 ad for Battle Ax Plug Tobacco (from the Oakland Tribune). The context here is that Battle Ax Plug Tobacco was produced by the American Tobacco Company, which was selling it at well below cost in order to drive its competitors out of business. So the ad's claim that it was the preferred brand of cheapskates was actually correct!
Thanks to such aggressive marketing techniques, the American Tobacco Company soon did dominate the market. But in 1907 it was indicted as being in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and was carved up by the government into four separate firms: American Tobacco Company, R. J. Reynolds, Liggett & Myers, and Lorillard. For more info, see The Dukes of Durham and wikipedia.
I learned of this song during a musical celebration of Black History Month on radio station WQXR. Certainly an artifact of its time.
You can mentally combine the instrumental music in the player with the words below.
Who Dat Say Chicken In Dis Crowd
There was once a great assemblage of the cullud population,
all the cullud swells was there,
They had got them-selves together to discuss the situation
and rumours in the air.
There were speakers there from Georgia and some from Tennessee,
who were making feather fly,
When a roostah in the bahn-ya'd flew up what folks could see,
Then those darkies all did cry.
Chorus:
Who dat say chicken in dis crowd?
Speak de word agin' and speak it loud--
Blame de lan' let white folks rule it,
I'se a lookin fu a pullet,
Who dat say chicken is dis crowd.
A famous culled preacher told his listnin' congregation,
all about de way to ac',
Ef dey want to be respected and become a mighty nation
to be hones' Fu' a fac'.
Dey mus nebber lie, no nebber, an' mus' not be caught a-stealin'
any pullets fun de lin',
But an aged deacon got up an' his voice it shook wif feelin',
As dese words he said to him.
Chorus:
Who dat say chicken in dis crowd?
Speak de word agin' and speak it loud--
What's de use of all dis talkin',
Let me hyeah a hen a sqauwkin'
Who dat say chicken in dis crowd.
Here's an old-timey hair tonic with a weird name. The strange noun just means "helper."
Composed of "55% grain alcohol," it went down many an alcoholic's gullet, I'm sure.
Believe it or not, the tonic was mentioned in a SIMPSONS comicbook. If you look at their ad below, you'll see why. The mutant female user resembles the famed Springfield three-eyed fish.
Recent scholarship has traced the roots of Mad magazine's Alfred E. Newman back to the nineteenth century. But I don't believe anyone has ever before noted his resemblance to this animated version of Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen, as seen in the 1942 Superman cartoon "Showdown," embedded above.
How fitting that today both Jimmy and Alfred are owned by the same company, Warner Bros.!
Mrs. Keyte of Blockley, Gloucestershire had a pet trout that would eat worms from her hand. When it died in 1855, she erected a tombstone in its honor. That tombstone remains one of the most popular tourist attractions in Blockley. And it's perhaps the only tombstone for a trout in the world. [National Geographic, 1917]
Back in the days before TV and the internet, people amused themselves over the holidays by playing parlour games. One game popular in Regency-era Britain was "Bullet Pudding" [via tywkiwdbi]. Jane Austen's niece Fanny Knight described it in a letter sent to a friend :
You must have a large pewter dish filled with flour which you must pile up into a sort of pudding with a peek at top. You must then lay a bullet at top and everybody cuts a slice of it, and the person that is cutting it when it falls must poke about with their noses and chins till they find it and then take it out with their mouths of which makes them strange figures all covered with flour but the worst is that you must not laugh for fear of the flour getting up your nose and mouth and choking you: You must not use your hands in taking the Bullet out.
Nothing gets a party going like playing with live ammunition! The illustration below by Francis Hayman shows the moment when the bullet toppled from the top of the Flour pyramid.
Another game, called Snapdragon, involved lighting a bowl of brandy punch on fire and then trying to pick the raisins and nuts out of the punch without burning your fingers. Austenonly comments, "Though brandy does not burn at a particularly high heat it was still possible to be scorched and the point of the fun was to watch peoples expressions as they darted their fingers through the flames, picking out the fruit or nuts."
Category: Body, Education, Hygiene, Baths, Showers and Other Cleansing Methods, Nineteenth Century