by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence — The Mississippi Senator Who Turned His Own Murder Into Testimony

What do you do when you cannot win? Charles Caldwell — born enslaved, blacksmith, Mississippi state senator, captain of a Black militia company — was lured into a Clinton store cellar on December 30, 1875, and shot at the clink of a Christmas toast. The bullet did not kill him at once. So he made a decision. He told his killers to carry him up out of the cellar and into the street, in broad day, where the whole town could watch — and to remember they were killing a gentleman and a brave man, never a coward. He could not stop the bullets. He could decide what they would mean. Congress investigated; no one was punished; Reconstruction in Mississippi was over. But Caldwell turned his own murder into testimony and refused to let his killers write the story. Charles Caldwell needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

The City That . . . . Began America’s Factories

Every American factory has an ancestor, and it stands beside a waterfall in Rhode Island. In 1793 a young Englishman who had smuggled the secret of cotton spinning out in his memory built the first water-powered mill in the country here — seventy-two spindles that multiplied into millions and clothed a nation. This is the story of the place where it all began: the falls, the families, the first factory strike in American history, and a yellow mill still standing over the water that started everything.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Brand That . . . . Cleaned the American Mouth

He arrived nearly penniless and believed soap and salvation were related. William Colgate boiled his first batch on a narrow Manhattan street in 1806; ninety years later his company put toothpaste in a collapsible tube and taught a whole country to brush — alone, twice a day, from a tube with one name on it. It is the rare brand in this series that was never swallowed by a larger combine: more than two centuries on, Colgate still trades under its own name, owned by no one above it. Here is how a Baptist soap maker’s promise became the daily ritual of a nation.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Brand That . . . . Turned Gunpowder Into Chemistry

A French immigrant came home from a hunt in 1800 angry about his gunpowder, and two centuries later the company he built had given the country nylon, Teflon, Kevlar, and the suit that walked on the moon — and a chemical in nearly every bloodstream on earth. DuPont turned powder into chemistry, and chemistry into the very texture of modern life. This is the story of the laboratory that engineered the American future, and the cost the country is still paying for it.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Brand That . . . . Aged America’s Patience

A German farmer with too much corn turned his surplus into whiskey — and his family spent the next seven generations teaching a restless country to wait. From a barrel-shed in 1795 to a sixteen-billion-dollar sale to Japan in 2014, Jim Beam survived Prohibition, the death of its founder, and fire on the strength of one thing no rival could rush into being. Here is the story of the brand that aged America’s patience — and what it cost the river the night the warehouse burned.

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