“Maid service is getting harder and harder to find at any price and only too often, even if you pay top wages, you will have to put up...

Ancestry.com, as a genealogical tool, is a start for many doing genealogy. I see it as a way to sketch and share only. There are a lot of...

Teresa Carpenter does not arrange the selected snippets of text in a chronological order. Instead, she starts with January 1, and then...

It’s not all sauerbraten and rouladen. I was pleasantly surprised by incredible salads, grilled fish, and lots of mushrooms while in...

Some old women’s magazines from the 1940s turned up when we emptied my grandparents’ house. You would expect the articles and...

Lecturing at the Bergen County Historical Society, March 2011. I’m a Collections Manager in a large New York City institution. My first...

Gurnice Stephens. Harford County, Maryland. 1944. It’s no secret, I can see the search terms readers use to get to The Still Room. Some I...

This  finger-wag at women about appropriately dividing their time between pleasure and work is fun to sing. Interesting that work is...

This post is not about servants. So much of the time when I refer to runaways, it’s in relation to indentured and enslaved women....

In researching the lives of indentured and enslaved women during the 18th century, I’m trying to rebuild their communities, to better...

The Cable Car Power House. RL Fifield, 2009. San Francisco is the city where I started to learn to look, compose, and photograph. I feel...

I’ve been working on a short story for years about a friendship slipping into an unfamiliar place. One of these days I’ll fish it out of...

Fred Harvey was a British immigrant that brought high standards for trackside eating halls alongside the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe...

Der Wöchentliche Pennsylvanische Staatsbote 9/17/1773. As part of my research on 18thcentury working class clothing, I have been studying...

More train poetry, spawned by the parade of deteriorating industrial buildings which may be viewed by Amtrak and NJ Transit passengers...

Continental Journal. October 23, 1783. Photo: Newsbank, American Antiquarian Society. #costume #dress #England #fashion

Cosplay-Japan Expo 2012. Photo by Lomita. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. I was minding my own business on...

Last Tuesday, I was somewhere in eastern Ohio. I had access to a car, and nothing to do for eight hours. You got it – it was Lincoln...

How to cover a 400 year old mattress? Comparing dusts vacuumed from a chair every three years to tell if it is deteriorating? Condition...

New: see the full article online here. If it doesn’t come up, go to the home page and search again. Abraham Emmit labeled her “an ill...