Detective Sergeant Marie Owens was the daughter of Irish famine immigrants. She moved to Chicago from Ottowa with her husband, and when he died of typhoid fever leaving her with 5 children to support, in 1889 she got a job with the city health department as a factory inspector enforcing child labor and compulsory education laws. Not unlike certain federal agencies to this day (*cough* USDA *cough*), the health department had no real power to compel businesses to obey child labor laws. They couldn’t even walk into a factory without a warrant.

The outcry over Dickensian sweatshop conditions spurred the city to take a firmer hand, and in 1891 Marie Owens was transferred to the police department. She was given powers of arrest, the title of detective sergeant and a police star. It wasn’t just a sinecure or one of those Official Police Assistant certificates they give to kids, either. She was a for real police officer, listed on a record of all police officers from the years 1904 through 1910 found in the archives of the Chicago History Museum. She even made the front page of the Chicago Tribune on August 7, 1904, described in the headline as “the only woman police sergeant in the world.”

Owens described how she had discovered children — “frail little things” as young as 7 years old — working in factories all over the city. Some assembly lines were staffed by scores of kids, many looking suspiciously younger than 14, the age at which children were legally allowed to work.

“In my sixteen years of experience I have come across more suffering than ever is seen by any man detective,” she said.

Her work affected thousands of children. She established schools within department stores so young workers could get an education, and she persuaded other employers to shorten their workdays, according to historical news accounts.

In 1923, she retired after 32 years with the department. Four years later, she died at age 74. The brief, eight-line death notice that ran in local papers didn’t mention her police career. Already, her work seemed to be fading from memory. And when a historian confused her with another woman and described Owens in a book about policewomen as a patrolman’s widow, her accomplishments were struck from history.

In 2007, Rick Barrett found a reference to her as the wife of a fallen policeman when he was researching Chicago police officers. When he looked up the death records, however, he found a discrepancy. Owens’ husband was listed as a gas fitter, not a cop. His interest now fully piqued, Barrett combed through all the records he could find, piecing together her remarkable life story and now finally calling attention to this overlooked pioneer.

Coucher’s granddaughter, Carolyn Keen (not the author of Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, but she gets points for the awesome name anyway), expected to find some film in the attic, but she didn’t realize there was such a depth of detail about the war at home.

The family donated them to the St. Marylebone Society, an architectural preservation group that Alfred Coucher, who had been wartime mayor of Marylebone in west London, helped found. With support from the Westminster Council, the color film has been digitized and uploaded to the West End at War website in honor of the 70th anniversary of the Blitz. They are short clips of just a few minutes each, in total 20 minutes of footage.

As well as panoramic shots that bring to life the sheer extent of the bomb damage in 1940, the films superbly capture the Blitz spirit as Londoners carry on with their daily routine and double-decker buses run along roads cleared of rubble.

Although the East End of London suffered the worst damage during the Blitz, the films provide a rare glimpse of the destruction wrought in the West End – the heart of London’s theatre and shopping district.

The John Lewis store, which was hit by a German bomb as 200 people slept in its basement air raid shelter, has a large “open for business” sign despite a large part of it being reduced to a shell.

In another scene medics are seen carrying wounded civilians into ambulances, and Mr Coucher also made a training film to show other air raid wardens how to deal with incendiary bombs, fires and casualties.

There’s also footage of Winston Churchill reviewing a parade of civil defence workers in Hyde Park.

So much of London was destroyed. I forget that sometimes when I get grumpy about the questionable zoning choices the city has made the past 70 years. The color footage really brings it all into high relief, the enormity of the destruction and how people somehow still lived their lives. The pops of red, the bus driving through the rubble, the stretcher blankets, in this video I find particularly affecting.

The anchor logo visible on the intact corks suggested that the champage cargo was from an early run of Veuve-Clicquot, possibly sent by ship from King Louis XVI to the Russian imperial court of Catherine the Great. Those initial reports are still possible, but experts from Veuve-Clicquot now think that the champagne came from another high-end brand, long since defunct. That expands the potential date range to the early 1800s.

Because the corks still retained a trace of an anchor logo, experts at first thought the champagne might have come from the historic Veuve-Clicquot estate, still one of the world’s top brands of bubbly.

After inspecting and trying a sample of the perfectly preserved vintage, the firm however said at the beginning of August it was in fact from the now defunct Juglar house.[...]

Veuve-Clicquot’s chief cellarman Dominique Demarville, one of a tiny number of people who has been allowed to taste a few millilitres of the find, estimated that the wine dated from the first third of the 19th century.

This means it is not clear whether it is the oldest champagne ever drunk, as an 1825 Perrier-Jouet was tasted by experts in London last year.

You can see video footage of the divers recovering the champagne bottles from the wreck in this BBC story. Once all the champagne is salvaged, experts will be able to make more precise assessments. They’ll have plenty of time to examine the haul since Aaland authorities haven’t yet decided what they’ll do with the champagne.

Meanwhile, divers found another potential oldest drinkable beverage from another part of the same shipwreck. This time it’s 200-year-old beer still sealed in its bottles. One of the bottles exploded from the pressure when they brought it to the surface and they saw a dark liquid seeping out, so they knew it wasn’t champagne.

“At the moment, we believe that these are by far the world’s oldest bottles of beer,” Rainer Juslin, permanent secretary of the island’s ministry of education, science and culture, told CNN on Friday via telephone from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands.

“It seems that we have not only salvaged the oldest champagne in the world, but also the oldest still drinkable beer. The culture in the beer is still living.”

Juslin said officials had talked to a local brewer about whether the new-found beer might be able to yield its recipe after experts decipher the brew’s ingredients.

The cold (water remains a constant 4-5 degrees Celsius, 39-41 degrees Fahrenheit) and dark conditions of the Baltic make it an outstanding long-term cooler. The beer was still foaming when it leaked from the broken bottle, and some of the crew couldn’t resist taking a wee drappie.

The previous record-holder for oldest beer dates from 1869, so even if the shipwreck does turn out to be from the third decade of the 19th century, the beer will retain a world record that the champagne might have to give up.

There they were kept in proper archival conditions, with controlled temperature and humidity, wrapped in acid-free paper. That wasn’t enough to reverse the years of damage. There were holes and frayed spots, tears, unseamed seams on all of the dresses. All the Ransom Center could do was keep them from getting any worse.

That wasn’t going to do, however, to properly celebrate the 75th anniversary of “Gone With the Wind” with a full exhibition of the Selznick Collection in 2014, so the Harry Ransom Center appealed to the public to raise the needed restoration funds. It was an instant success. The $30,000 were raised in a mere 3 weeks.

The museum said more than 600 people from 44 U.S. states and 13 countries contributed to the appeal.

“These generous donations confirm that the film’s legions of fans do, in fact, care,” Steve Wilson, film curator at the Ransom Center, said in a statement.

He said the donations will allow the Ransom Center to restore the dresses and purchase protective housing and custom-fitted mannequins to allow for them to be exhibited according to conservation best practices and standards.

“Gone With the Wind” has some dedicated fans, no question, but I can’t help but wonder if the Ransom Center is kind of kicking itself for not asking for $60,000 given how quickly they reached the goal.

The 5 dresses which will be restored and properly housed thanks to the generosity of the public are the green velvet dress Scarlett made from curtains, the burgundy ball gown she wore to Ashley Wilkes’ birthday party, the wedding dress from her wedding to Charles Hamilton, a blue velvet peignoir and a green velvet dressing gown.

Ancestry.com has a large collection of scanned documents like passport applications and passenger lists of people who passed through what was for several decades the primary port of entry to the United States, but it’s a subscription service. The oral histories project began before there even were such things as .coms, so the site made a deal with the National Parks Service guaranteeing that they would be made available to the general public for free in perpetuity. The recordings were previously available only to visitors at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum.

The voices in these hour-long oral histories have the gravelly, well-worn emotional timbre familiar to anyone whose older relatives hold forth and bend the family’s ears over Thanksgiving dinners. Collected by members of the National Parks Service beginning in 1970, the interviewees discuss their experiences arriving in the United States, but also give perspective on how their lives have been in the country some of them believed was “paved with gold” before they arrived. What is remarkable to a 21st-century audience is the kind of high-stakes stories these voices describe: children lost in an overwhelming crowd, fathers embracing families they didn’t expect to see again, a Hershey bar tossed to a daughter as a symbol of America’s prosperity.

The Ellis Island Oral History Program set out to collect as varied a range of experiences of Ellis Island immigrants as they could. They asked immigrants to discuss their lives in the country of origin, family history, the voyage to New York, arrival and life in the US. Interviewees range in age from 46 to 106 and came from many different countries.

Searchable information includes names, birth dates, countries immigrated from, ages, ship names and any other information flagged during the interview. To search the oral histories, click here. Here’s one short sample of how moving these stories can be. This is Lillian Galletta describing seeing her father upon her arrival at Ellis Island in 1920.

Ellis Island processed 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954, although from 1924 onwards immigration was severely restricted and only war refugees or displaced persons came through Ellis Island. Immigrants had to answer 29 questions (name, occupation, how much money did they have, etc.) and were given a quick medical exam. Inspectors deported 2% of those 12 million people for chronic contagious disease, criminal background, or insanity.