Thursday, April 7, 2016

What the Crud, is this the Casper Daily Press day by day page or something?

I've been posting, as readers are aware, the century old issues of The Casper Daily Press on the anniversary of their publication.  This probably seemed obviously related to the Punitive Expedition of 1916 up until yesterday, when I ran this one:
The Casper Daily Press for April 6, 1916
This evening issue is inserted here not for what is on the front  page, but for what isn't. 
For the first time since the Columbus Raid, the Punitive Expedition didn't make the front page for the Casper Daily Press.
Well, rest assured, I have been running them due to the entries we've been having on the Punitive Expedition, which as this entry, What the Crud? Is this the Punitive Expedition Day by Day Blog or something? makes clear, we've been marking the centenary  of various events as they occurred.  The newspaper entries are part of that, and are part of our A Day In The Life series, being posted for Wyoming on the 100 year anniversary of their publication on the theory that this is something a local person would have read as they came out.  How they would have received the news.  This squares with the purpose of the blog to explore what life was like in the early 20th Century.  

And it has been really interesting. For one thing, it has shown how a variety of concerns, not just one, expressed themselves day after day.  This is, indeed, how real life is, but it isn't how we typically think of a historical era.  While we're focused on the Punitive Expedition in these posts, at the time the readers of the Casper Daily Press were also focused on World War One, an outbreak of train robbery, the price of gasoline, and the local economy.  The flavor of the times comes across a bit differently than we might have suspected.

For those who are tired of the daily newspaper electronic delivery, a century late, it won't go on forever.  And indeed, I know when it'll stop on a daily basis as these posts are teed up to be posted already, well ahead of when they actually will appear.  As the Punitive Expedition was what brought them to our attention, when the expedition really disappears from an issue of the paper, I'll quit posting them everyday.  Some might might miss them at that time (and some big events will occur before they disappear), but converting them from pdf to jpeg is actually quite a chore so it'd be difficult to keep it up, and of course at some point it would distract from the blog, if it isn't already.

But it has been interesting. And its drawn our attention to a lot of things we've missed.  Papers will continue to appear from time to time and some of the aspects of life that we'd missed from the era that we haven't commented on yet, will be topics of future posts.

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