Events for October 2024

NEWS

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June 13, 2018

Women fight for their rights – and their fashions?

I’ve been thinking a lot about ladies recently. Besides being an absolutely delightful one myself, I spend a lot of time around powerful, accomplished, intelligent women who work hard every day to make life better for those around them. On a much larger scale, it is impossible to deny that American women are once again in the spotlight, receiving national attention as we define women’s rights, roles, and personal agency moving into the 21st century. American women were doing much the same 100 years ago as the world moved into the 20th century. Questions about women’s rights, roles, and personal agency needed to be answered for a rapidly changing world. The answers to those questions revealed themselves in a variety of ways – in the passage of the 18th and 20th Amendments, which started Prohibition and granted women the right to vote, respectively, and in the swift and major changes in women’s apparel from the 1890s to the 1920s. While changes in fashion might seem frivolous next to major political change, women’s clothing and activities have always closely reflected that society’s attitudes towards women. Women’s leisure clothing saw the largest innovations and changes as women gained more agency within American […]
June 13, 2018

Washington County – a go-to vacation destination

Very few things have captured the hearts of modern Americans in the same way as the iconic vacation trip. We obsess over our vacation time and agonize over every detail of the trip. Where to go? Where to stay? What to do? The prospect of a literal escape from daily life offers a mental escape for many. As a result, the American travel industry is worth over a trillion dollars, and Washington County is just one of many American locations which benefits from the popularity of cultural tourism. But it may surprise many to learn that Washington County has been the vacation destination of choice of many for over 200 years. The idea of the modern vacation begins, like so many other trends, with the European aristocracy. As many larger cities developed, they unfortunately did so without an eye towards public health, sanitation, or even basic sewage containment. By England’s Elizabethan Era, the average London city street contained a several foot-thick morass of dirt, dust, mud, human and animal waste, garbage, butcher’s offal, and chemical runoff from any neighborhood businesses (including tanneries, which utilized sheep’s urine to process animal hides). The street muck only worsened as the Industrial Revolution led […]