1900-Present

It is the year 1927 and I am sitting in the dark vestibule of the Festival Theatre in Cambridge. I am listening to a rich Irish voice that seems to intone a request that I should come to Dublin and produce for the Abbey Theatre. The voice…

It was October 1953 on a flight bound for Texas from New York. Carmel Snow, then the editor of Harpers Bazaar was sitting with her cousin, Veronica Freeman. Next to them was a nervous young woman in her early thirties named Sybil Connolly.…

Ferdinand Waldo Demara, commonly known as “Fred”, was born in Lawrence Massachusetts in the December of 1921. The family were fairly well off when he was born, but his father lost a lot of money in the Great Depression and the family had to…

Note: This edition of Terrible People from History covers sexual exploitation, and gets more than a little gory as well. Consider yourself forewarned. Abe Sada was born in Tokyo in May 1905 to a relatively respectable middle class…

Josephine Baker was born in 1906 as Freda Josephine MacDonald in St Louis, Missouri. Her mother Carrie was a washerwoman and ex-vaudeville girl, her father was a drummer named Eddie Carson who ran off when Josephine was only a little girl.…

Belle Gunness was an immigrant who came to America in 1881. She took the name of Belle Storseth when she came over from Norway. She was born in 1859 as Brynhild, and her original surname was probably Paulsdatter Størseth. Details on her…

“What will cause the riot?” wrote Spike Lee in his diary back in 1989. “Take your pick: an unarmed Black child shot, the cops say he was reaching for a gun; a grandmother shot to death by cops with a shotgun; a young woman charged with…

On the 10th of August 1916, a new film premiered in London’s Scala Theatre. This in itself was not unusual. Even during war time, the entertainment industry remained active. What was unusual was that this film marked the first time a…

John Norton was born in Brighton in January 1858. His father was a stonemason who died before John was born, and his mother Mary remarried when he was a child to a silk weaver named Benjamin Herring. Herring was religious - the bad kind of…

John Creagh was born in Limerick City in Ireland in 1870. Limerick was a city of strong cultural divisions - it had traditionally been a fortified English city used to control the surrounding area until the relentless tide of…