Comstock, with the Lady Managers, did visit the Midway dance attractions and convinced the general-director of the fair to get a court order to shut down the Persian Palace. A court immediately granted representatives of the Persian Palace an injunction and none of the dance attractions on the Midway were shut down. You can read more about this in Popular Culture and the Enduring Myth of Chicago, 1871–1968, by Lisa Krissoff Boehm.
All of the Midway attractions and World’s Fair locations in the novel are real, based on maps of the Expo drawn at the time.
A lot of seemingly insignificant details of 1893–94 Chicago life are based on truths about our own timeline, gleaned from historical documents available online. Seamstresses were in fact paid about $1.50 per day, and there was a successful strike led by steelworkers at the Expo to get overtime pay on weekends and after hours. Sheet music companies popped up on Wabash Street after the Midway closed, along with theaters advertising dancers from the Midway. Many commentators of the time complained that the entire city smelled like rotting meat because of runoff from the slaughterhouses in the river and sewer system. The problem continued until engineers working with the city’s newly formed Chicago Sanitary District reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900.
Raqmu, heart of the Nabataean Kingdom, is what I imagine Petra, Jordan, might still be called today if ancient Greeks and Romans had not colonized the city over two thousand years ago. Petra is the Greek name for a city that once called itself Raqmu.
Lucy Parsons was one of Chicago’s most respected anarchist leaders, and a founder of the IWW. Though she claimed to be indigenous or Spanish, scholars today believe she was an African American born into slavery. This is thanks entirely to new research by historian Jacqueline Jones for her book Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical (which is what Tess had read, and referenced when she talked to Aseel and Soph). Lucy and Emma Goldman did in fact get into a very public fight over sexual liberation, equal to today’s biggest Twitter train wrecks. And yes, Emma did have a boyfriend named Sasha (Alexander Berkman), who failed spectacularly to assassinate Henry Frick. Emma continued to date him after he got out of prison. She was jailed by Comstock more than once for her writings and speeches about sexuality.
Aseel’s alter-ego Lady Asenath pays homage to an elusive figure called Little Egypt, who was rumored to be the greatest belly dancer on the Midway. After the Expo ended, many different performers called themselves Little Egypt, particularly white women who appropriated dances from nomadic groups in North Africa for their burlesque performances. Aseel is extremely loosely based on many of the dancers described by Donna Carlton in her excellent history of belly dancing, Looking for Little Egypt. One, Fahreda Mahzar Spyropoulos, supposedly came to the Midway from Arizona and later settled down in Chicago to run her husband’s restaurant. But Carlton can find no evidence that anyone calling themselves Little Egypt ever performed on the Midway. The name seems to have become popular afterward among burlesque and vaudeville dancers. It was used most famously by a dancer named Ashea Wabe. In 1896, Wabe was hired by two grandsons of P.T. Barnum—members of the Four Hundred—to perform the danse du ventre for their bachelor party at Sherry’s. After she was arrested on charges of stripping, the event became an enormous scandal, dubbed by the press “the awful Seeley dinner.” Wabe went on to become a notorious performer and very wealthy self-made woman. She died of gas asphyxiation in 1908. It was likely a suicide.
Grumpy theater critic George Bernard Shaw did indeed coin the term “Comstockery” to mean prudery or over-the-top moralism—though he did it about ten years after the events described in this novel. You can read his first use of the term in a letter to The New York Times in 1905 (https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1905/09/26/117951415.pdf). It became a popular term in the early twentieth century to mock people who wanted to censor art, or who were culturally ignorant.
Sol Bloom, remarkably, was a real person. In his early twenties, he was a music promoter who brought the dance troupe for the Algerian Village over to the United States from France, and wound up landing a job managing all the attractions on the Midway. Famously, he didn’t want the job and demanded a salary higher than the U.S. president. To his surprise, the city of Chicago met his salary request. After a very successful stint in the music business, he became a U.S. senator who advocated for immigrant rights until the day he died. He published a book about his life, called simply The Autobiography of Sol Bloom.
The song Aseel writes is a variation on the one attributed to Sol Bloom in our timeline. You can listen to Bloom’s song here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A5yJ5Z2Ezw. I prefer Aseel’s version, partly because it actually makes sense. Sol always regretted that he didn’t act fast enough to sell the song as sheet music, thus securing the exclusive rights to it. The song was appropriated so quickly by other dance acts that it became basically a folk song, impossible to copyright. You’ve probably heard the tune, if you grew up in an English-speaking Western country, where it is synonymous with cheesy stripper music and Orientalist tropes. One of the common variants on the lyrics does include the line (presumably about Sol Bloom) about how the dance the ladies do “was written by a Jew.” And yes, the tune is also in a delightful Ke$ha song called “Take It Off.”
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a real-life international organization whose members include scientists, industry researchers, and public servants who study Earth, our atmosphere, and space. They have advocated tirelessly for government and industry to recognize the reality of climate change. If we ever do find time machines in the Earth’s crust, AGU members will be all over that.
Most of the locations that Lizzy and Beth visit in Irvine and Los Angeles are based on places I knew as a teen in the late twentieth century. No, I never killed anyone, though I will confess that I might have thought about it a few thousand times. As we said back then: Irvine sucks. Some of Beth’s family backstory is based loosely on things I experienced. My great-grandfather was jailed for arson in the early twentieth century, and my grandfather owned an auto repair shop in Los Angeles until the 1980s. My father committed suicide many years ago, after struggling for a long time with depression. He and my mother went to college together at UCLA, and took me to the La Brea Tar Pits a lot.
I remember a world where abortion was legal in my country. I hope you do too.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was a work of collective action, and thanks are due to the many people who talked to me about it, read early drafts, and generally listened to me stressing out about it for two years.
First, thanks to the many scientists, researchers, and friends who gave me ideas. Physicist Adam Becker talked to me about the impossibility of time travel, and cosmologist Sean Carroll agreed that time travel was impossible, but kindly suggested I think about wormholes and a “narrative force” that creates a timeline. Geology researcher Josh Zimmt speculated about what people could eat during the Ordovician and what it would smell like. Ethnomusicologist K. Goldschmitt told me about the nineteenth-century music industry and appropriation. Archaeologist Sarah Wenner talked to me about the Nabataean Kingdom in the first century C.E. Historian Karen Ordahl Kupperman let me interrogate her about social change over centuries, and pop history chronicler Lynn Peril gave me tons of sources about rational clothing and New Women. Adrienne Crew, creator of the incredible Louche Angeles Instagram, told me about being a Black girl in the L.A. punk scene during the 1980s. Science history aficionado Esther Inglis-Arkell suggested that the villain of this novel should be Anthony Comstock. Author Jess Zimmerman talked to me about witchcraft. Critic Lynn Rapoport and filmmaker Fivestar spent many late nights talking to me about indie music, indie porn, and all the good things in between. L. A. Kauffman inspired me with her writing and political actions more times than I can count.