“and iced tea hadn’t been invented yet.”
Well not exactly...
“The oldest printed recipes for iced tea date back to the 1870s. Two of the earliest cookbooks with iced tea recipes are the Buckeye Cookbook by Estelle Woods Wilcox, first published in 1876, and Housekeeping in Old Virginia by Marion Cabell Tyree, first published in 1877.
Iced tea had started to appear in the USA during the 1860s. Seen as a novelty at first, during the 1870s it became quite widespread. Not only did recipes appear in print, but iced tea was offered on hotel menus, and was on sale at railroad stations. Its popularity rapidly increased after Richard Blechynden introduced it at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.”
And no Federal or state guns laws of any kind! Only local ordinances against, for instance, carrying in town.
I’m glad that I got to talk to men who were born in the 1870s and 1880s.
In 1910, my grandfather was four years old. He once told me that when he was a boy in northern Mississippi, all the kids would chase any car that happened to drive through town, to get a better look. They were that rare.
It was in the early eighties when he told me that story. We lived in Los Angeles at the time, amid millions of modern vehicles, and men had already walked on the moon. He honestly felt that he had lived to see science fiction become reality.
That life expectancy rate has always been misunderstood. Yes, the average was 47 because of the tremendously high infant and child mortality rate. But if you made it to the age of 20, you had a pretty good chance of reaching your 60s and 70s. There were also quite a few 80+ years people of both sexes in those days. I remember getting into an argument one time with two co-workers who firmly believed no one ever reached the age of 50 in those days. They quoted the life expentancy rate of 47, and I couldn’t disabuse them of their belief.
“Two out of every 10 adults couldn’t read or write and only 6 percent of all Americans had graduated from high school. “
Today, more than two cannot read or write even though 100% of all children have access to schools. Conversely, although only 6% graduated high school, more could read and write then than now.