March 29, 2024
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Forty miles north of New York City, “up the Hudson River,” Sing Sing Prison got a new warden in 1915. Thomas Mott Osborne ushered in a wave of penal reform. Out went the lockstep, in came (limited) prisoner self-governance. T. Fred Robbins, a nearby photographer and constable, was allowed to document many of the changes…
By age 17, John Lewis Childs had a well-planned and nearly perfected career path doing business as no one had done before. He sold seeds through a catalog. It made him one of America’s richest men. The post office in his small Long Island community grew so fast due to the volume of mail he received, they compared it to Boston and Baltimore.