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One of my biggest fascinations with the Old West is with what life in a Rocky Mountain mining town in nineteenth century would have been like. It would have been a life full of filth, rough characters and hard work combined with drinking, fighting and gambling as pastimes. Of course these are stereotypes of any … more »

Just as a quick announcement, I’ve spent quite a bit of time today getting History Rhymes back up and running at full capacity after switching themes. The new theme broke some of my old pages, specifically the Archives and Links pages, but now those problems are resolved and they’ve both been slightly redesigned. Aside from … more »

I have a new featured book for you this week. This one is an American classic called Roughing It by Mark Twain. It is one of Mark Twain’s travel books which made him famous as an author. In this book he writes about his travels throughout the Old American West, his adventures with mining, newspaper … more »

According to The Times, the British Library is currently undertaking a project to digitize their collection of more than 65,000 nineteenth century books in an effort to preserve them and make them available for free for public consumption. The only catch is that you must own an Amazon Kindle which is something I find incredibly … more »

The Johnson County War has gone down in history as one of many Wild West legends about range wars. Some accounts claim various famous gun slingers like Jesse James were involved, however, this was certainly not the case. The real range war occurred in April 1892 and was the result of tensions, brewing between small … more »

The other day I stumbled upon a very interesting website put together by the City of Westminster, London. It is a digitalization of the journal of Nathaniel Bryceson, an early Victorian clerk. The journal was written in 1846 when Nathaniel was nineteen years old. The online version as posted on the website for the City … more »

This week I have a new featured book called Europe in the High Middle Ages by William Chester Jordan. It is a very well-written book which details the Europe in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It covers a range of topics from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia, the Crusades to monasteries, the Catholic Church … more »

I’ve decided it was time to update the look of History Rhymes to something a bit more professional-looking. This new theme I chose, called Lightword is a modern theme that supports the features of WordPress 2.9 which is what powers History Rhymes. The old theme did not support all of the new features, such as … more »

Here are a couple of videos that I found interest to watch. They are videos of people walking about in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

If you cannot view the video above, you need to download a browser which supports the latest HTML 5 standards. Firefox is a good and free choice. You can also download the video here. In continuing with interesting old videos of European monarchs of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, I have posted a video of … more »