Pioneers of America: Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way 1897 old Ontario print The Gentlemans Apparatus Patent 38233

The Gentlemans Apparatus Patent 38233 belongs to the era when every neighborhood had its barber and every barber had his preferences — and patents like this one were how those preferences became standard

postmarked from the cotton mills' last good decade

bitter retreat through Kentucky's hills toward the Ohio

Furnished as a Premium With the Morning Day of Reform 1883 — a subscriber's bonus from the Gilded Age press

William Orlando Butler

Pioneers of America: Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way 1897 old Ontario print The Gentlemans Apparatus Patent 38233Pioneers of America: Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way 1897 borrows Bishop Berkeley's old prophecy and dresses it in late century chromolithograph splendor wagon wheels, trail dust, and the long American habit of mistaking momentum for destiny. By 1897 the frontier was already declared closed, which makes this image less reportage than mythmaking in arrears. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical