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Author / Elizabeth Van Flandern

London’s Female Shoplifting Mafia of Yesteryear

We think of the corsets and voluminous petticoats of the 1800’s as painfully limiting to the women who wore them, but a group of female gang members in 20th century London would be inclined to disagree. Enter the “Forty Elephants”, also the “Forty Thieves”, an all-female gang that terrorized London and the surrounding area for…

The Forgotten Doughnut Heroines of Wartime

The doughnut– America’s favourite indulgence– has an unexpected heroic history. Despite having been invented in the 1800s, the doughnut wasn’t popularised until WWI, when the ring-shaped pastries brought comfort to thousands of soldiers serving in the trenches during the brutal years far from home. The Salvation Army, a well-known Christian charitable foundation, became the first prominent organisation to…

The Brothel Boss Lady who Helped Build Seattle

Like many West Coast settlements, Seattle is a city built on sin. As a logging town and port city their main industry might have been lumber, but the businesses that kept them competitive were the ones that could keep the sailors and other labourers entertained. Madame Lou Graham was a businesswoman through and through, and while…

Meet the Woman Behind New York’s 1800s School For Crooks

Fredericka “Marm” Mandelbaum, better known as the “Queen of Fences” was a homely Prussian immigrant running a dry goods store with her husband and four children. She was also one of the biggest crime bosses the city of New York had ever seen. Marm came to New York in 1827, a poor immigrant peddling bits of silk…

The West Coast’s Dark Secret It’d Like To Keep Underground

Some underground histories are famous, but some have remained just that, underground. Even if you live on the West Coast, you might not have heard the urban legend of Portland’s infamous Shanghai Tunnels. Portland, a port city in Oregon near the Columbia River, has a gridlock of interconnected basements and passageways under many of it’s…
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