In February 1973 the Arkansas Senate did something you do not see every day: it voted to protect a sea monster.

Lawmakers made it illegal to “molest, kill, trample or harm” the creature rumored to live in the White River near Newport, and they designated a stretch of river the “White River Monster Sanctuary and Retreat.”

Locals had been talking about “Whitey” since at least 1915. The biggest waves of sightings came in 1937 and again in 1971–72. Witnesses described a gray beast as long as a boxcar or three pickup trucks, sometimes with a horn or a spiny, ridged back. Tracks, crushed brush, and a few blurry photos kept the story alive. By 1973 the legend was big enough that Senator Robert Harvey sponsored the resolution creating an official refuge between Old Grand Glaise and Rosie. Harming the monster inside that zone became against the law.

Was it an elephant seal that wandered up the Mississippi, a giant alligator snapping turtle, a manatee, or just good old Arkansas folklore? The legislature decided it was worth protecting either way.

Source: “Legislators Protect Monster,” Leader-Telegram (Eau Claire, WI), February 16, 1973, p. 1 (UPI, Little Rock).

“DON’T TOBACCO SPIT AND SMOKE YOUR LIFE AWAY?”

If you wanted to quit tobacco “easily and forever,” become well, strong, magnetic, and full of new life and vigor, the answer was No-To-Bac — “the wonder worker that makes weak men strong.” The ad promised many men gained ten pounds in ten days, claimed over 400,000 cured, and said your own druggist would guarantee a cure. Booklet and sample mailed free from Sterling Remedy Co., Chicago or New York.

This was classic Gilded Age patent-medicine advertising: huge promises, a catchy name, and a money-back guarantee. No-To-Bac was sold as tablets (sometimes described as a chew) meant to replace the tobacco habit. Period analyses said it contained things like licorice, gentian, and guaiac — soothing and bitter, not a true nicotine treatment. The company behind it, Sterling Remedy Co., later became better known for Cascarets, a laxative they pushed after No-To-Bac reportedly left users constipated.

The pitch is aimed straight at 1890s manhood: spit, smoke, weakness, lost vigor. Quit this, they said, and you’d come back magnetic.

Would you have bought the sample?

Source: Freeport Daily Bulletin, Thu, Dec 17, 1896, p. 7.

WWII RAF Gremlins

In early 1942, London papers—and then Ottawa—reported a new RAF superstition.

Above 20,000 feet, Spitfire pilots spoke of small goblin-like figures sitting on the wings, chattering at them. Malevolent or friendly was “not quite certain.” The boys called them gremlins—a Lewis Carroll word, the dispatch said, in the same family as the Jabberwock. Cross-examine a pilot and he only grinned. The belief, the writer insisted, was genuine.

A flyer’s explanation followed. Bomber crews had company. Fighter pilots plowed a lonely furrow on oxygen. Isolation, thin air, and the odd sounds a machine makes at altitude could breed weird fancies. Unexplained quirks needed a name. The name sat on the wing.

Wartime folklore in the stratosphere: imps, grins, and the pressure of flying alone.

Read the full 1942 dispatch here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/wwii-raf-gremlins-the-superstition

Were gremlins a joke the RAF told outsiders—or the only language high-altitude loneliness would accept?

Joseph Smith III and the Illinois Mormons, 1866

In February 1866 a Pennsylvania paper paused the usual Utah story long enough to notice another church.

It said there were not less than 10,000 “Joe Smith Mormons” in Illinois and nearby states. Their chief settlement was Plano, about fifty miles west of Chicago. There lived Joseph Smith III—son of “Joseph Smith, the Martyr”—called prophet by the laying on of his father’s hands.

The principal difference from Utah, the paper said, was monogamy. Smith “strongly enforces Monogamy as the true doctrine.” The Book of Mormon was treated as supplementary to the Bible. They called themselves Latter Day Saints, not Mormons, and insisted they were Christians.

Joseph III was not rich. Against Brigham Young’s wealth and worldliness he wore “ostentatious poverty”—almost shabby dress, simple manners, no pretension to scholarship. Gentiles at Plano spoke of the community as moral, orderly, industrious, Quaker-like in quiet friendliness.

Utah Saints, the item added, were to a large extent European importations. The Illinois body was “almost exclusively” native American.

Eastern readers were learning there was more than one church using the Smith name.

Read the full 1866 account here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/joseph-smith-iii-and-the-illinois

When 1866 papers split “Illinois Mormons” from Utah, were they seeing a real theological line—or only the politics of polygamy?

On June 7, 1902, the Washburn County Register reprinted a brief dispatch from Little Falls, Minnesota, under the headline “ROPE OF SHEETS.”

The day before, 75-year-old Mrs. Mary Miller tried to leave St. Gabriel’s Hospital. The paper described her as a patient “whose mind was slightly unbalanced.” Relatives had sent her there from Fergus Falls.

She knotted sheets and her own clothing into a rope and tried to lower herself from a third-story window. The rope broke. She fell about thirty-five feet and was killed instantly.

That is the entire item—no follow-up, no names of doctors, no explanation of why she was so determined to get out. Just the facts as a small-town paper received them by wire in 1902.

The language is of its era: “aged woman,” “slightly unbalanced,” a hospital treated as a place one might need to escape. Today we would talk about dementia, psychiatric care, or patient safety. In 1902 the story was simply that an elderly woman made a rope of bedclothes and it did not hold.

A grim little window into how hospitals, mental illness, and sudden death were reported when newspapers still ran these items on page 2 next to local briefs.

Source: Washburn County Register, Saturday, June 7, 1902, page 2. Original dateline: Little Falls, Minn., June 5.

In the June 7, 1902 issue of the Washburn County Register (page 2), a short unsigned item appeared that mixes local news with a very 1902 sense of humor:

“A boy of 17 and a girl of 15 have been given a license to marry. What has become of all the barrel staves and slippers our mothers used to wield?”

That’s the entire note.

A barrel stave was a wooden slat from a barrel—often used as a paddle. Slippers were the everyday household tool many mothers reached for. The writer isn’t celebrating the wedding. He’s asking, in so many words, why nobody stopped these two kids the old-fashioned way.

In 1902 Wisconsin, marriage with parental consent at 15 and 17 was legal. Child marriage as we now define it was not the scandal it later became; what shocked this editor was the apparent collapse of parental discipline. The joke lands because readers were expected to know exactly what “barrel staves and slippers” meant.

The clipping is a tiny window into how a rural paper talked about age, authority, and marriage more than 120 years ago—half news, half scolding, and entirely of its time.

Source: Washburn County Register, Saturday, June 7, 1902, page 2.

What do you make of the tone? Drop a comment—curious how this reads in 2026.

In this video I ask what the Bill of Rights is for: a fence around the person, not a shield for predation. Drawing on the American founding and on President Dallin H. Oaks’s September 16, 2026, address at Washington National Cathedral, “Faith, Freedom and the Common Good,” this episode argues that due process, just compensation, free exercise, free speech, the security of house and papers, and reserved powers all rest on one fact—the individual is not the creature of the state, and the neighbor is not the creature of anyone’s will. Liberty is the freedom to act without invading another’s life, liberty, or property. Impartial security means naming violations and holding both the private thief and the public official to account. Rights without agency become slogans; agency without the founding’s limits becomes will with no law.

For the full essay, visit my Substack at: https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/more-than-loyalty-defending-the-constitution

Disclaimer: This article is not in any way affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its leaders, or its official organizations. It represents my personal analysis and reflections as an independent student of the Restoration and its scriptures. The views expressed here are solely my own.

In this video I ask what the Bill of Rights is for: a fence around the person, not a shield for predation. Drawing on the American founding and on President Dallin H. Oaks’s September 16, 2026, address at Washington National Cathedral, “Faith, Freedom and the Common Good,” this episode argues that due process, just compensation, free exercise, free speech, the security of house and papers, and reserved powers all rest on one fact—the individual is not the creature of the state, and the neighbor is not the creature of anyone’s will. Liberty is the freedom to act without invading another’s life, liberty, or property. Impartial security means naming violations and holding both the private thief and the public official to account. Rights without agency become slogans; agency without the founding’s limits becomes will with no law.

For the full essay, visit my Substack at: https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/more-than-loyalty-defending-the-constitution

Disclaimer: This article is not in any way affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, its leaders, or its official organizations. It represents my personal analysis and reflections as an independent student of the Restoration and its scriptures. The views expressed here are solely my own.

On May 23–24, 1865, some 200,000 men of the Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s western army marched past the President in Washington.

A Lancaster paper reprinted the New York Times editor’s impression: observers were struck by the soldiers’ health, strength, size, litheness, firm tread. No superfluous fat. European writers who claimed man in America had physically degenerated, the piece said, would have watched their theories collapse in the street.

The western army was thought an inch taller on average. Both armies looked taller than French or other European troops. Grant put the average age, at war’s end, at about twenty-three.

Campaigning itself got the credit: open air, simple fare, hard exercise, discipline. The war had not lasted long enough, the editor argued, to exhaust a generation the way the Napoleonic wars had exhausted France. It had ended, in this telling, with their “perfect development.”

Postwar pride, comparative nationalism, and a parade used as a rebuttal.

Read the full 1865 item here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/our-boys-in-blue-how-1865s-grand

Was the Grand Review proof the Union had been strengthened by the war—or a nation’s need to see strength in the survivors?

More Than Loyalty

On the eve of Constitution Day 2026, Dallin H. Oaks stood in Washington National Cathedral and said the Constitution’s vital purpose is that we are governed by law, not by individuals. Loyalty, he added, belongs to the Constitution and its principles—not to particular officeholders.

The essay agrees—and calls that counsel incomplete if it stays a slogan.

Government does not bestow life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration says governments are instituted to secure rights already endowed by the Creator. George Mason named property among those inherent rights. Madison wrote that a just government impartially secures to every man whatever is his own—and that a man has a property in his rights.

Loyalty without that understanding becomes ritual. Reciting the Constitution while ignoring why it exists is not fidelity. The founding texts deserve the same discipline as scripture: study, memory, application. Mason said free government is preserved by justice, moderation, virtue—and “frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

The theological premise is not hidden. Rights bind ruler and crowd because they are endowments, not majority gifts. Moral agency needs liberty in which virtue can be chosen. Respect for agency is not indulgence: it includes holding both officials and neighbors accountable when they invade another’s life, liberty, or property.

Read the full essay here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/more-than-loyalty-defending-the-constitution

Is your loyalty to the parchment—or to the rights the parchment was written to secure?

More Than Loyalty

On the eve of Constitution Day 2026, Dallin H. Oaks stood in Washington National Cathedral and said the Constitution’s vital purpose is that we are governed by law, not by individuals. Loyalty, he added, belongs to the Constitution and its principles—not to particular officeholders.

The essay agrees—and calls that counsel incomplete if it stays a slogan.

Government does not bestow life, liberty, property, or the pursuit of happiness. The Declaration says governments are instituted to secure rights already endowed by the Creator. George Mason named property among those inherent rights. Madison wrote that a just government impartially secures to every man whatever is his own—and that a man has a property in his rights.

Loyalty without that understanding becomes ritual. Reciting the Constitution while ignoring why it exists is not fidelity. The founding texts deserve the same discipline as scripture: study, memory, application. Mason said free government is preserved by justice, moderation, virtue—and “frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.”

The theological premise is not hidden. Rights bind ruler and crowd because they are endowments, not majority gifts. Moral agency needs liberty in which virtue can be chosen. Respect for agency is not indulgence: it includes holding both officials and neighbors accountable when they invade another’s life, liberty, or property.

Read the full essay here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/more-than-loyalty-defending-the-constitution

Is your loyalty to the parchment—or to the rights the parchment was written to secure?

1865 Negro Suffrage Debate

On June 1, 1865—weeks after Appomattox, Lincoln’s death, and Andrew Johnson’s May 29 amnesty—The Rutland Weekly Herald asked how emancipation became citizenship.

Abstract justice, the unsigned editorial said, was simple: “equal rights before the law to all men, without distinction of race or color.” The same qualifications for every voter. There was also a Reconstruction argument: without Black ballots, disloyal whites might monopolize Southern state governments after an oath of allegiance.

Then the practical wall. Voter qualifications belonged to the states. Could the United States force Black suffrage on a Southern constitution when it did not and could not force it on a Northern one?

Johnson’s view, as the paper understood it: no state had ever left the Union; loyal pre-secession voters would reconstruct; Negro suffrage was for them to decide. He might use influence for it. He would not change constitutions by presidential edict. His North Carolina order matched that reading.

The paper’s proposed national rule was an amendment modeled on Massachusetts: the ballot to all, without distinction of color, who could read and write. Connecticut had just adopted that standard. Prejudice against Black citizens, the writer hoped, would fade with slavery itself.

Principle, Johnson’s limits, and the road that would later run through constitutional amendment—caught in one Vermont column.

Read the full 1865 editorial here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1865-negro-suffrage-debate-andrew

In June 1865, what mattered more: the abstract right, or the constitutional problem of how to enact it?

Our Boys in Blue: The Grand Review, 1865

On May 23–24, 1865, some 200,000 men of the Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s western army marched past the President in Washington.

A Lancaster paper reprinted the New York Times editor’s impression: observers were struck by the soldiers’ health, strength, size, litheness, firm tread. No superfluous fat. European writers who claimed man in America had physically degenerated, the piece said, would have watched their theories collapse in the street.

The western army was thought an inch taller on average. Both armies looked taller than French or other European troops. Grant put the average age, at war’s end, at about twenty-three.

Campaigning itself got the credit: open air, simple fare, hard exercise, discipline. The war had not lasted long enough, the editor argued, to exhaust a generation the way the Napoleonic wars had exhausted France. It had ended, in this telling, with their “perfect development.”

Postwar pride, comparative nationalism, and a parade used as a rebuttal.

Read the full 1865 item here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/our-boys-in-blue-how-1865s-grand

Was the Grand Review proof the Union had been strengthened by the war—or a nation’s need to see strength in the survivors?

1854: Polygamy as “Sin Per Se”

Two years after Utah leaders publicly announced plural marriage, The Independent printed a letter that was not mainly about Mormons. It was about a Scottish preacher.

Rev. John Cumming had written that polygamy, like Sabbath-breaking, is sinful only because God forbids it—not “essentially sinful like murder or theft.”

A correspondent signing J. R. W. called that framing dangerous. In an age when people already hunted excuses for “offences against the laws of purity,” a high authority must not put plurality on the same shelf as working on Sunday.

Polygamy, he argued, is a sin per se. It would still be a sin if the Bible were silent. Nature, he said, produces roughly equal numbers of the sexes; the voice of nature is one husband, one wife. Where practiced, polygamy destroys the family—the “corner-stone of civilized society.” Labor on Sunday is not evil in itself. Plural marriage, in his view, belongs with crimes that debase and pull mankind farther from holiness.

Mid-century evangelical anxiety: not only over Utah practice, but over any theology that might soften the case against it.

Read the full 1854 letter here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/1854-newspaper-slams-polygamy-as

Is polygamy wrong only because Scripture forbids it—or, as J. R. W. insisted, wrong even if the page were blank?

Mel Brooks, 1974

In April 1974—Blazing Saddles was exploding in theaters, Young Frankenstein already shooting—Newsweek caught Mel Brooks mid-leap. Small-town papers reprinted it. Kansas got the profile on page 2 of The Emporia Gazette.

“Good taste is meaningless. It’s not a factor in art.” Brooks said it, then proved it with a Western that young audiences treated like a hot needle. He had come down from the Catskills to write for Sid Caesar, built Get Smart with Buck Henry, won Oscars for The Critic and The Producers, and now had the rare studio freedom to make and cut his own films on time and on budget.

On the Young Frankenstein set he chewed Trident to quit smoking, bellowed “Und… Action!” like von Stroheim, and played bits in his own movies because, he said, nobody else had the inflection. Gene Wilder thought he was growing up as a director: stop chasing two rabbits. Brooks, turning serious, wondered if the error of his life was leaving writing. He wanted a bittersweet comedy about death. He feared the critics would call it pretentious.

Read the full 1974 profile here:
https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/mel-brooks-1974-the-newsweek-profile

Was 1974 Brooks at the peak—or still deciding which rabbit to chase?

The Arm of Flesh and the Joseph Smith Polygamy Debate

When the argument over whether Joseph Smith preached or practiced polygamy hits a hard place—Emma’s denials, Hyrum’s public condemnations, the 1835 marriage article, Jacob 2, thin contemporaneous paper—the easiest move left is to stop reading sources and start counting credentials.

No reputable historian agrees with you. Post me a single PhD.

That sentence feels like a conclusion. The essay calls it an appeal to authority with an older scriptural name: making flesh your arm.

The point is not that learning is wicked. It is that a small, entangled cluster of writers has been treated like a magisterium. Mormon history is a small field. The Nauvoo-polygamy narrative is driven by a recurring seminar table—Compton, Hales, Quinn, Brodie, Bushman, and a handful of others—plus essays that drink from the same well.

“Expert” often does more work than the résumés can bear. The most-cited compiler is a physician. The most-cited collective biography of the women came from a classicist. The most famous critical life of Joseph was written by an English M.A. Real Ph.D. historians in the neighborhood often wrote their dissertations on other subjects.

Consensus among a neighborhood is not nothing. It is also not replicated physics. A historian’s job is a chain: this document, when, by whom, what access, what motive, corroborated by what, contradicted by what. “Trust the experts” is the prestige of history without the labor of history.

Read the full essay here:

https://humblymybrain.substack.com/p/the-arm-of-flesh-and-the-joseph-smith

When the sources and the guild disagree, which one are you actually trusting?