Happy Halloween! Bells have a sinister side, too, you know. As my colleague Tiffany Ng has argued in her doctoral dissertation, in cultural representations bells have been associated with utopias and dystopias—death, decay, and all the rest of it. And we don’t even have to look at cultural representations—we can just look at the macabre security coffin from Europe.*   Fear of being buried alive has been common since time immemorial. By the 19th century, western science still hadn’t quite honed in on the notion that death was confirmed by a stopped heartbeat, and anecdotes abounded of the dead coming … Continue reading Buried Alive, with Bells

Thanks, B.D., for passing along these dramatic details about the Great Chicago Fire and the courthouse bell! Donald L. Miller, author of City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, explains the particulars. He does … Continue reading The Bell of the Great Chicago Fire II

Dear loyal readers, I have a scrumptious treat to share with you! We don’t know much about Henry Rincker, Chicago’s own bell founder, and his metallurgical output in the mid-nineteenth century, but we know he did cast a bell for … Continue reading The Bell of the Great Chicago Fire