By Lisa Hix — In the late 19th century, from the moment that American women were granted the freedom to leave their houses unescorted, they encountered a pest known as “the masher.” Generally, a smarmy mustachioed fop, this unfamiliar man winked at or brushed up against a shop girl on the streetcar, loomed over and stalked a working woman walking down the street, called out “hey turtle-dove” to teenage girls. The most galling mashers groped, hugged, and kissed any girl or woman they declared...

A House for 1,000 Vintage Hats, and the People Who Love to Wear Them

By Maribeth Keane and Brad Quinn (Copyright Collectors Weekly 2010) — We have more than a thousand hats here at The Hat Museum. It’s the largest hat museum in the United States, and has twice as many hats as the Hat Works museum in England. Our collection comes from private collections, vintage clothing stores, estate sales, antique shows, hat shops, catalogs, other museums, and donations. We’ve given by-appointment tours of the house for 17 years. We started with about 600 hats in 2005. It was a fairly complete collection when we opened. We have...

A Feather in Your Cap: How Women Wore Their Hats, from Marie Antoinette to WWII

By Maribeth Keane and Brad Quinn — When I was about eight years old, I went up into my grandma's attic one day and found a little bonnet and a red plaid dress in a trunk. It looked liked something I’d seen in history class. I took it right down to grandma and asked her about it. She said, “That's the dress your great aunt wore when Lincoln's funeral train came through Syracuse.” So I called up the local Syracuse paper, and they confirmed that Lincoln’s funeral train had indeed stopped in town, and stayed for about 15...