Petite – indeed, elfin–Lotta projected a winsome, appealing innocence and a girlish charm even in her mature years. Ada Isaacs Menken’s attraction, like that of Lola Montez, was explicitly erotic. The first years of her career playing romanic heroines-were undistinguished. In the early 1860s, however, she exploited the scandalous dissolution of her bigamous marriage to […]
character
Will Wright
Most who knew William Wright, a colleague of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) on Virginia Cityโs Territorial Enterprise, believed that of the two, Wright was the most likely to succeed. Instead, Twain went on to achieve immediate national and international fame while Wright, nineteenth-century Nevadaโs most important literary figure, slipped into obscurity until recently. Wright was […]
W.H.C. Stephenson
Dr. W. H. C. Stephenson (1825โ18??) was northern Nevada’s most prominent African-American citizen in the nineteenth century. One of Virginia City’s few African-American professionals, Stephenson served as the unofficial spokesperson for northern Nevada’s African-American community in the 1860s and was involved in numerous efforts to improve conditions for African-Americans in Nevada. Stephenson was born in […]