Monday, October 27, 2025

A history of early female judges.

Illustration of suffragist and lawyer Catharine Waugh
McCulloch
, elected as a justice of the 
peace in Illinois in 1907 
(Long Valley [ID] Advocate, 16 May 1907)

As the Law and Literature blog notes, Elizabeth D. Katz, professor of law at the University of Florida, discusses the history of often forgotten early female judges in  "'May It Please Her Honor': The United States' First Women Judges, 1870–1930" in the Washington University Law Review. Some even obtained positions before passage of the 19th Amendment that granted US female citizens the right to vote.

Monday, October 20, 2025

Edward Gorey, mystery fan.

Sign for the Edward Gorey House.
Photo by Elizabeth Foxwell.

I recently visited the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, MA, which was a fascinating place—full of collections compiled by the distinguished artist and author (winner of the Tony Award for set design and costume design for Dracula—the docent referred to the Gorey House as "the house that Dracula built"). His book collection included some 26,000 volumes and is now housed at San Diego State University (about 35 percent of it can be searched here).

Gorey (1925–2000) was a devoted mystery fan. A short browse through his library yields 41 works by Agatha Christie, 39 works by Wilkie Collins, 30 books by Guy Boothby, 24 books by Margaret Sutton [Rachel Beebe], 16 Nancy Drew books, 16 novels by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, 11 works by Jane Langton, 8 books by Patricia Wentworth, 7 books by Catherine Aird, and 6 books by Ross Macdonald [Kenneth Millar].

Some sample titles:

Monday, October 13, 2025

The Rosenbach's Sherlock Monthly programs.

"Lestrade took out his official note-book."
Illustration by Sidney Paget for "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,"
 by Arthur Conan Doyle. The Strand Magazine, May 1904.

The Rosenbach
offers Sherlock Monthly, a free series of programs delving into the Sherlock Holmes canon. Recent episodes focus on "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" (1904), "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez" (1904), "The Adventure of the Three Students" (1904), "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" (1904), "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (1904), and "The Adventure of Black Peter" (1904). The programs are archived.

Monday, October 06, 2025

Film Music Friday: Jazz in Films.

Steve McQueen in Bullitt (dir. Peter Yates, 1968)
A recent Film Music Friday on Kansas Public Radio pays tribute to jazz in films, including Anatomy of a Murder (music by Duke Ellington, 1959), Bullitt (music by Lalo Schifrin, 1968), and more.