by Charles C. Jett

The City That . . . . Collared the Country

In 1827 a Troy housewife, tired of scrubbing a whole shirt to clean one collar, took her scissors to it — and started an industry. Within a lifetime this city on the Hudson made nine of every ten collars in America, named the white-collar and blue-collar worker, and sent its steam-laundry women into the front ranks of American labor. The collar trade is long gone, but Troy kept the city the collar money built: one of the richest stands of Gilded Age architecture in the country, now a backdrop for The Gilded Age itself. Here is how a kitchen-table fix collared a nation — and shod the Union’s horses besides.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Brand That . . . . Dressed the Republic

It invented the suit you could buy off a rack and wear the same day, and it cut the soft-shouldered coat that dressed the American professional class for a hundred years. Brooks Brothers dressed forty of the nation’s presidents — and one of them, Abraham Lincoln, was wearing its coat, the lining embroidered One Country, One Destiny, the night he was shot. This is the story of the oldest apparel house in America: the ready-made suit, the “shoddy” war scandal that put a word in the language, the bankruptcy that shuttered its last American mills, and the 2025 return to lower Manhattan a few blocks from where it began.

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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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