Roundtable

The Rest Is History

Presidential Easter eggs, an 1860s criminal mastermind, and England’s most famous modern witch.

By Angela Serratore

Friday, March 25, 2016

 White House Easter egg rolling, 1911. Library of Congress.

• Three decades of White House Easter egg hunts. (Pictorial

•​ The nineteenth-century criminal empire of New York City’s Marm Mandelbaum: “Fencing stolen items became Mandelbaum’s main hustle. A criminal would steal anything from jewelry to furniture, and sell it to Mandelbaum, who would turn around and sell it to another buyer. Mandelbaum’s favorite items were bolts of silk and diamonds, both of which she could buy on the cheap and sell at a huge mark-up. But she would take anything.” (Atlas Obscura

•​ An Uncle Tom’s Cabin-themed card game popular with 1850s readers (and card players): “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin  generated more tie-ins than any other pre-twentieth-century book,’ historian Louise L. Stevenson writes in a survey of the many Uncle Tomrelated materials produced in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Before the 20th century, a book’s intellectual property was fair game to any manufacturer that saw promise in it. ‘Neither Stowe nor her publisher...benefited from the proliferation in Europe and the United States of Uncle Tom’s Cabin products,’ Stevenson writes.” (Slate)

•​ Reconsidering Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts. (BBC)

•​ Doreen Valiente, the mother of modern witchcraft: “For a good while, Doreen remained closeted in her practice, not wanting her Christian mother to discover that her daughter had become a Pagan priestess. She was initiated during a time when the Craft was still very secretive—‘in the broom closet,’ as they say. This was also, of course, pre-feminism: empowered female mystics were an even harder concept to swallow then than today. Women (especially unmarried women) were not supposed to seek out or know anything about sex; nudity was considered obscene; religion was supposed to be a corrective, separate from anything that gave a person pleasure, and certainly not ‘sex-positive.’ Someone who declared herself a witch could lose her job, be made a social outcast, or have her children taken away.” (Tin House)

• The Easter Rebellion’s supporters in Harlem: “Antislavery activist Frederick Douglass, touring Ireland, discovered a land that welcomed his thoughts on resistance to the master class’s authority, and felt at home there, recalling it fondly for the rest of his life, and wondering why the poor, downtrodden Irish were so much more sympathetic than their American offspring.” (The New Republic