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.

Read More…
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.

Read More…
by Charles C. Jett

The City That . . . . Lit the World’

Before the oil came out of the ground, it came home from the sea. For one shining generation New Bedford was the richest city in America, dollar for dollar, and the whale oil its ships hauled back from years-long voyages lit lamps from Boston to London — though the men who hauled it were often paid in debt, not dollars. Then they struck petroleum in Pennsylvania and the long ebb began. But “faded” is not “died”: today the same deep harbor lands the most valuable catch of any fishing port in the country. Here is the story of the city that lit the world, and is hauling still.

Read More…
by Charles C. Jett

The Brand That . . . . Ground America’s First Chocolate

Before the republic had a name, a mill on the Neponset River was already grinding chocolate. In 1764 a penniless Irish chocolatier and the Dorchester doctor who staked him made the first chocolate manufactured in America — and the name they settled on, Baker’s, is still on a green box in the baking aisle today, the oldest American grocery brand still on a shelf. Here is the story of a chocolate older than the country: the vanished founder, the chocolate girl borrowed from a Dresden gallery, the hard truth in its first century, and the sign over Dorchester that went dark for fifty-six years and was lit again.

Read More…
by Charles C. Jett

In the Arena – Vincent van Gogh — He Kept Painting for a World That Had Not Yet Learned How to See Him

He failed at everything before he failed at painting. Art dealer, teacher, bookseller, preacher to the miners — every respectable path threw Vincent van Gogh out before he was thirty.
So he picked up a pencil. He gave ten years to it, kept alive by his brother Theo, and the world rewarded him with almost nothing. He died at thirty-seven believing he had failed. He never saw it turn.
Then a young widow read his letters and decided the verdict was wrong. She spent thirty years proving it. The vindication came. It just came too late for him to hear.
The work outlived the verdict.
The credit belongs to Vincent van Gogh.

Read More…