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Hugh Ellsworth Rodham, born 1911, April 2, Scranton, Pennsylvania, graduate of Pennsylvania State University, small textile supply owner; died, April 7, 1993, in Little Rock, Arkansas The second of three sons, Hugh Rodham was the first in his family to attend and graduate from college, able to attend Penn State University on a football scholarship.Upon graduation, he found work as a travelling salesman of drapery fabrics through the upper-Midwest. He met Dorothy Howell, who was working as a company clerk typist and after a lengthy courtship they married and moved into a one-bedroom Chicago apartment. With the outbreak of World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy, stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Station, an hour outside of Chicago, where he worked as a chief petty officer. He oversaw sailor training. After the war, he began his own small, independent drape and fabric printing business in downtown Chicago.He assumed responsibility for his younger brother, Russell, a former physician who suffered from mental depression. Gruff, often highly critical of his children as a way to encourage their improvement in school grades and behavior, he taught Hillary the habits of hard work and study and that one had to earn success. Extremely thrifty, he also taught his children to never waste even the smallest amount of anything from food to toothpaste.Mother:Dorothy Howell Rodham at the time of her 1942 marriage. (WJCPL)Dorothy Emma Howell Rodham, born June 4, 1919, Chicago, Illinois; married to Hugh Rodham, 1942; died November 1, 2011.Beyond what might be considered a traditional closeness with her mother, Hillary Clinton has described Dorothy Rodham as a crucial figure in life, not just a mentor and role model but one who had a story that sparked part of her lifelong mission on behalf of children's rights and protection.Were it not for the care, direction and attention from a neighborhood woman who Dorothy worked for as a "mother's helper," it is unlikely the young girl would have developed a sense of her own potential. Poised to begin college in California, her mother contacted her, asking her to return to Chicago, where she had remarried, promising to pay for her education. When Dorothy returned, however, she discovered that her mother intended to have her work for free as a housekeeper and would not underwrite her higher education as promised.In California, she also witnessed the effect of racial bigotry on her fellow students who were Japanese-American. It left her with a rigorous sense of justice and recognition of how many children experienced disadvantage and discrimination from birth. She taught Hillary and her sons that they were no less or more important than any other human beings.Although denied the chance for a college education, Dorothy would take many college courses during her adulthood. She also read voraciously as a way of teaching herself about the larger world.The impact of her mother's early life proved to be of enormous influence on young Hillary Rodham's perception of parenting and childcare.As a mother, Dorothy inculcated her daughter and sons to never permit others to bully them and to defend themselves. She also passed on her belief that gender was no barrier to any potential endeavor, and that it was right to expect, and fight for equal treatment as a right.Dorothy Rodham with her daughter Hillary. (New York Times)Hillary Rodham as a toddler in Chicago. (WJCPL)Ancestry:Welsh, French, Scottish, Native American, English; Hillary Clinton's paternal grandfather Hugh Rodham was born in 1879 in Northumberland, England and immigrated to Pennsylvania to work at the Scranton Lace Company.Her maternal great-grandparents, the Howells, were immigrants from England and settled in California.Her maternal grandmother, Della Murray migrated from Canada to Illinois and married secondly to Max Rosenberg who was born in Russia in 1901.Birth Order:Hillary Rodham as a young girl. (WJCPL)Eldest of three; two brothers, Hugh E. Rodham, Jr. (born 1950) and Anthony Rodham (born 1954)Physical Appearance:5' 6", blonde hair, blue eyesReligious Affiliation:Methodist. In being raised within the original tenets of Methodism as preached by its founder, John Wesley, Hillary Clinton's faith inculcated her with a sense of duty towards not just those in need in her community but also those in the world at large. She was baptized in the parish of her paternal ancestors, the Court Street Methodist Church in Scranton, Pennsylvania.Hillary Clinton with her influential youth minister Don Jones. (NPR)In 1961, her First United Methodist Church of Park Ridge's youth group was led by a new youth minister, Don Jones, who introduced the students to the "University of Life," that encouraged them into social action as a way of enacting the Methodist ideology. Jones would lead the group outside the comfort zone of their middle-class, white suburban neighborhood into areas of need and where they found ways to volunteer in community service. Discussions on matters of racial equality and social justice permanently altered her consciousness about the larger world and the problems within it.Hillary Rodham's childhood home, Park Ridge, Illinois. (politicalstew.com - Index page)Education:Eugene Field Elementary School, Park Ridge, Illinois, 1953-1957.In grade school, Hillary Rodham was an eager student lucky to have attentive and imaginative teachers, and she wrote an autobiography and co-wrote and produced a play about an imaginary trip to Europe. She also won her first "election" in these years, as a co-captain of the safety patrol.Ralph Waldo Emerson Middle School, Park Ridge, Illinois, 1957-1961Maine Township High School, East and South, Park Ridge, 1961-1965Hillary Rodham on high school student council. (WJCPL)In high school, Hillary Rodham was as immersed as her peers in popular culture, heading up a fan club for the singer Fabian, crushing on one of the Beatles and attending a Rolling Stones concert.She also succeeded academically, becoming a National Honor Society member, joining a debating society, and being elected to student council and as the junior class vice president. She later reflected on how influential Paul Carlson, her ninth-grade history teacher had been on her thinking about individualism and the rights of each person to determine their own fate, in the context of that era's anti-communism that was a large part of the agenda of the conservative wing of the Republican Party.Second from left, Hillary Rodham making her first television appearance on a local Chicago station, with her high school "Cultural Values Committee." (WJCPL)As part of an effort to create greater understanding among divisive sub-groups within her high school, she was asked by the principal to serve on a "Cultural Values Committee." The group's efforts to find common bonds among the disparate student body was her first recognition of what she would come to identity as the crucial "American value" of "pluralism," the idea that however different the details of their acculturation, all Americans were united by a set of values, most important among them being "mutual respect and understanding." Her work on the committee led to her first appearance on television to discuss their work.Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts, 1965-1969Hillary Rodham delivering her famous speech at Wellesley College graduation. (www.wbeegood.com)As Senior Class president, Hillary Clinton became the first student speaker at graduation, addressing the audience of faculty, graduates, their families, and guests in a speech that made national news. Here is an audio recording of that speech:Yale Law School, New Haven, Connecticut, 1969-1972Hillary Rodham in 1969. (Rex Features)At law school, Hillary Rodham was a member of the board of editors of the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, and graduated with honors.Yale Child Study Center, 1973-1974Upon graduating from law school, Hillary Rodham took a post-graduate year of study on children, exploring issues of early childhood development, child abuse, and medical-related matters. She also worked as a research assistant to the center's director, Dr. Al Solnit and one of her professors Joe Goldstein for their book, co-authored with Anna Freud, entitled Beyond the Best Interests of the Child.Occupation before Marriage:At the age of three years old, Hillary moved with her parents from their downtown Chicago apartment to a home in the booming, postwar suburb of Park Ridge. She was an active child, joining the Brownies and Girl Scouts, a girl's baseball team, and was often out biking, swimming and skating.Hillary Rodham with other children who raised funds for a local United Way campaign, presenting their earnings. (WJCPL)Even as a young girl, much of the diligence she would show later in her professional life were in evidence. In 1959, she organized backyard carnivals, sport competitions and gaming contests to raise money to raise funds, by nickels and dimes, on behalf of a local United Way campaign. It led to her first bit of publicity, appearing in a local newspaper photograph with other children handing over a paper bag of the money they raised. Hillary Rodham also worked as a babysitter both after school and during her vacation breaks, sometimes watching the children of migrant Mexicans brought to the Chicago area for itinerant work.Hillary Rodham as a "Goldwater Girl" in high school.(WJCPL)Ambitious at one point to become an astronaut, she wrote to NASA and received a response that stunned her when she was informed that women were not accepted for the astronaut program.Influenced by her father's strong loyalty to the Republican Party, Hillary Rodham was active in a young Republican group. She actively campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. Also influenced by her mother, who was a Democratic, she was inspired to work in some form of public service after hearing a speech in Chicago by Reverend Martin Luther King.In the summer of 1968, she was accepted into the Wellesley Internship Program in Washington, for nine weeks, assigned to work as an intern for the House Republican Conference. In that capacity, she was directly led by the future US President Gerald Ford, then serving as House Minority Leader, as well as congressmen Melvin Laird of Michigan and Charles Goodell of New York.Hillary Rodham as a congressional intern with future president Gerald Ford. (WJCPL)She was then invited by Goodell to continue working as an intern on behalf of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's last-minute presidential bid at the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami, Florida. She attended the convention and watched as Richard Nixon was nominated for the presidency by his party.In her senior year, she researched and wrote a thesis on Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky. Although she agreed with his premise that the disadvantaged of society had to be empowered to help themselves, she did not agree that social change came about best from working outside the establishment but rather from within. Although he offered her a chance to work with him after she graduated, Hillary Rodham decided instead to attend law school and work from within the system.She also worked at various jobs during her summers as a college student. In 1969, for example, she spent the summer washing dishes at a Denali National Park restaurant and sliming and boxing salmons in a canning factory in Valdez, Alaska fish factory.In 1970, she secured a grant and first went to work for what would become the Children's Defense Fund. Part of her research work that summer involved the concurrent Senate hearings held by Senator Walter Mondale's (Minnesota Democrat) subcommittee on migrant workers, researching migrant problems in housing, sanitation, health and education. Upon her return to Yale Law School, Miss Rodham determined to commit her focus to studying the law and how it affected children.Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton at the time they were dating. (WJCPL)On the final day of her law classes in the spring of 1971, she met fellow law student Bill Clinton from Arkansas and had their first date by going to the Yale Art Gallery to see a Mark Rothko exhibit. In the summer of 1971, Hillary Rodham worked as a clerk at the small law form Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein in Oakland, California. Bill Clinton, already declaring his love for her, followed Hillary Rodham and they lived in Berkeley, near the University of California campus.Upon graduation from law school, she served as staff attorney for the Children's Defense Fund in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the summer of 1972, however, she joined Bill Clinton, living in a series of western states working for the Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern's campaign.In 1973 and 1974, while simultaneously working at the New Haven Legal Services during her post-graduate year at the Yale Child Study Center, she became exposed to severe cases of child neglect and abuse. The convergence of this work led her to help draft the legal process that the medical staff of the Yale-New Haven Hospital would use in dealing with cases where child abuse was suspected.Hillary Rodham as a member of the House Judiciary Committee's Watergate staff. (CNN)Hillary Rodham's first published scholarly article, "Children Under the Law" was published in the Harvard Educational Review in 1974. The article explored the sensitive issues involving to what degree judicial and legal powers should intervene in cases of child abuse and neglect.In the spring of 1974, she returned to Washington as a member of the presidential impeachment inquiry staff advising the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives during the Watergate Scandal. With Nixon's resignation in August of that year, the need for the continued work ceased.Marriage:Bill and Hillary Clinton on their wedding day. (WJCPL)27 years old, married 1975, October 11, Fayetteville, Arkansas to William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born August 19, 1946, Hope, Arkansas), professor of law.Although her education, legal and professional experience led to her being given a number of choices at well-paying and established New York and Washington law firms, she decided to instead "follow my heart" and go to the small-town of Fayetteville, Arkansas where her boyfriend Bill Clinton was working as a law professor at the University of Arkansas Law School. Hillary Rodham also joined the law school faculty there as assistant professor of law.While they were dating, Bill Clinton secretly purchased a small house in Fayetteville that she had noticed and remarked that she had liked. When he proposed marriage to her and she accepted, he revealed that they owned the house. Their modest wedding ceremony and reception were held in their new home.The Clinton home in Fayetteville, now a museum. (Wikipedia)They married and lived here, briefly. Following Bill Clinton's election in 1976 as state attorney general, the couple relocated to the state capital of Little Rock, Arkansas.In 1976, the newly married Hillary Clinton attended that year's Democratic National Convention in New York, which nominated Jimmy Carter as the party's presidential candidate. Carter asked Bill Clinton to head his campaign in Arkansas and asked Hillary Clinton to work as field coordinator in Indiana. After the couple took a two week vacation in Europe, she relocated to Indianapolis to work for Carter's campaign.

John Quincy Adams (President and son of a President) was a strong anti-slavery voice. Adams was an outspoken opponent of slavery, and it was he who had spoken before the US Supreme Court in 1839 in support of the Africans on the captured slave ship Amistad and helped to obtain their release and freedom.Watch (4 minutes)The absurd theory that the black race was better suited as laborers to the hot climate of the South than the white was put to rest by Adams: "Europeans cultivate the land in Greece and in Sicily; why should they not do so in Virginia or the Carolinas? It is not hotter there."[i]Thanks to his studies in Europe as a young man at the Leiden University and as an adolescent, Adams returned to the newly formed United States with a cosmopolitan outlook. Later, he accompanied his father through Spain, France, England and Holland on diplomatic missions. Adams’s career path cut right through Napoleonic Europe.Sectionalism had grown in the Antebellum Period, but increased intra-party political tension was often most obvious at the state level where “old party republicans” and “new party republicans” fought for control of their caucuses in the state legislatures and disputed the power to choose gubernatorial candidates, US senators, and other state officials. Ironically these were precisely the evils of an unchecked popular democracy that had been predicted by the Federalists during the Constitutional Convention (1787).Continued internal wrangling led to the presidency of John Quincy Adams (1825–1829), candidate of the short-lived National Republican Party, and ultimately to a new two-party system. Democrats (the modern party formed from the Democratic Republicans in 1828 under Andrew Jackson) and Whigs (formed in 1833 in opposition to Jacksonian policies) dominated this so-called Second-Party System during the next eight presidential election cycles.During a long political career (1803–1848) as ambassador, state senator, secretary of state, congress member, and president, John Quincy Adams was a member of five distinct national parties — the Federalist, Democratic-Republican, National Republican, Anti-Masonic, and Whig parties — attesting to the volatility of the American political structure in the first half of the 19th century.Like his politics, Adams’ views on slavery and race evolved over the course of his career. He often dealt with slavery-related issues during his seventeen-year congressional career, which began after his presidency had ended. It has been suggested that he was not a true abolitionist, although he quickly became the primary enemy of slavery in Congress in the decade of the 1840s. Adams clearly feared that the end of slavery could only come through civil war or the consent of the slave owning South — not quickly and painlessly as some abolitionists wanted.Raised by two fervent antislavery advocates, Adams’ outlook on slavery — and what ending it meant for the American republic — took many turns in his diary’s pages. “What can I, upon the verge of my seventy-fourth birthday, with a shaking hand, a darkening eye, a drowsy brain, and with all my faculties, dropping from me, one by one, as the teeth are dropping from my head, what can I do for the cause of God and Man? for the progress of human emancipation? for the suppression of the African Slave-trade?” (1841)More than 50,000 women had been active in antislavery since the 1830s. They accumulated almost two million signatures on anti-slavery petitions that were presented to Congress. Northern lawmakers dutifully unfolded the reams of paper petitions and brought Congress to a standstill. A congressman from Virginia suggested that the women, if any existed, were free black women or women of mixed race, and implied that all were of questionable character and had no standing to petition Congress. The majority led by John C. Calhoun in 1836 voted to table them immediately as an isolated regional issue so the Senate could conduct the country’s business. Abolitionists called it a “gag rule.” In January 1840, the House of Representatives passed a standing House rule, which prohibited even the reception of anti-slavery petitions. Adams balked and was censured by the House, but he used his censure as a backdoor to bring forth again the issue of slavery in Congress. The “gag” was finally rescinded in 1844 with all the Northern and 4 Southern Whigs voting for repeal, along with 78% of the Northern Democrats. It was John Quincy Adams who had successfully assembled this coalition.Chief among the voices raised in protest of the war with Mexico was that of the former president. Adams, as a member of the House of Representatives (elected in 1830), was one of only 14 members of Congress to vote against the war. Adams believed that the government’s secret and immoral purpose in making war was to seize new territory into which slavery might be expanded. After the start of the war, he supported the Wilmot Proviso, an unsuccessful legislative proposal that would have banned slavery in any territory ceded by Mexico.On 21 February 1848, the House was discussing the matter of honoring US Army officers who had served in Mexico. Adams firmly opposed this idea, so when the rest of the House erupted into “Ayes”, he cried out, “No!” – his voice, usually small with age, stunning the chamber. At that precise moment, Adams collapsed, having suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage that led to his death.[i] Mayer, J. P., ed. Journey to America, by Alexis de Tocqueville. Translated by George Lawrence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960.See:Amazon.com: Antebellum America, Cultural Connections through History, 1820 – 1860 (Traditional American History Series Book 10) eBook: James M. Volo: Kindle Store

Thanks, Barbara, for the A2A.These questions lead us down some fascinating paths, deep into history and around the world – from Poland to New York and beyond. Some of the exact origins of the bagel are obscure and/or contested; but I will tell you what I know. (The ‘why’ prong of the question is, as so often, difficult even to pin down; some possible answers to ‘why’ — societal as well as practical/logistical — will emerge in what follow here.)Let us begin, as I like to do, with the word itself. Here is the opening definition from the Wikipedia page on the subject:A bagel (Yiddish: בײגל beygl; Polish: bajgiel), also historically spelled beigel, is a bread product originating in the Jewish communities of Poland. It is traditionally shaped by hand into the form of a ring from yeasted wheat dough, roughly hand-sized, that is first boiled for a short time in water and then baked. The result is a dense, chewy, doughy interior with a browned and sometimes crisp exterior. Bagels are often topped with seeds baked on the outer crust, with the traditional ones being poppy and sesame seeds. Some may have salt sprinkled on their surface, and there are different dough types, such as whole-grain and rye. Bagels are eaten toasted or untoasted.And here is the formal statement of Ed Levine, in a well-known 2003 article in the New York Times (for my citations, please see ‘Further Reading’ at the end of this entry):A definition of terms, then. A bagel is a round bread made of simple, elegant ingredients: high-gluten flour, salt, water, yeast and malt. Its dough is boiled, then baked, and the result should be a rich caramel color; it should not be pale and blond. A bagel should weigh four ounces or less and should make a slight cracking sound when you bite into it instead of a whoosh. A bagel should be eaten warm and, ideally, should be no more than four or five hours old when consumed. All else is not a bagel.These definitions might be said to move us forward from the jocular one offered in 1960 by Beatrice and Ira Henry Freeman: ‘an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.’ But none of those descriptions can truly prepare us for just how addictively delicious a good bagel can be.Wikipedia, as we saw earlier, situates the origins of the bagel in Poland (the earliest known explicit reference to the bread dates from 1610 in Kraków); Joan Nathan, apparently seriously, proposes (in her 2008 Slate article) that bagels were already known in ancient Egypt, mentioning that she had found hieroglyphics in the Louvre that described ‘rolls with a hole.’ She provides this illustration as evidence:But whatever you may think about ancient Egyptian bagels, Nathan also adduces (from Maria Balinska’s 2008 book on the bagel) analogues such as taralli (‘hard, round crackers flavored with fennel that have been the local snack for centuries in Puglia, Italy’), the Roman buccellatum, the Uyghur girde nan (烤馕 kǎo​ náng) of Xinjiang Province in China, and the Levantine كعك ka’ak. Nathan also very helpfully points out that a description of bagel-like boiled breads (without using the word ‘bagel’) can be found, in a Polish decree, as early as 1496, where the term used is obwarzanek (from the verb obwarzać, ‘to parboil’). This decree limited production of both white bread and obwarzanek to the Kraków bakers’ guild — which would have excluded Jews; as Ari Weinzweig observes in his 2009 article,In that era it was quite common in Poland for Jews to be prohibited from baking bread. This stemmed from the commonly held belief that Jews, viewed as enemies of the Church, should be denied any bread at all because of the holy Christian connection between bread, Jesus, and the sacrament. Strange though it sounds, Jews were often legally banned from commercial baking.But King Jan Sobieski apparently did not reconfirm the earlier decree, thus allowing Jewish as well as Christian bakers to bake bread within the city proper. The (probably apocryphal, but nonetheless touching) story is that ring-shaped rolls were made to honor the king, who had defended Austria against invasion by the Turks; the ring — called a Biegel or Beugel (< Middle High German beugen, ‘to bend, curve’) was, it is said, to represent the ring-shaped stirrups of the king.(According to Maria Balinska, this shift was already beginning in Poland in the 1200s, when Prince Boleslaw the Pious ruled, ‘Jews may freely buy and sell and touch bread like Christians.’ But by 1267, a group of Polish bishops — clearly alarmed by such a shocking idea as the allowance of basic culinary activities, and above all commerce, to people of Jewish blood — forbade the faithful to partake of foods purveyed by Jews.)Fast-forward, now, to the 20th century (though still not, as we shall see, to a non-bigoted attitude toward Jews). By 1907, there was an ‘International Beigel Bakers’ Union’ in New York City. These were of course the glory days of Ellis Island; there was an influx of immigrants into NYC, at this period, from Eastern Europe, as well as from other points around the globe.And, as Nathan points out, the concentration, at that time, of Jewish immigrants (especially Ashkenazim) on the Lower East Side naturally ‘created a demand for the breads of their homeland — rye, challah, and bagels.’ (Weinzweig also mentions blintzes — not strictly a bread, but still, a foodstuff from eastern Europe that is made from flour.) To quote Ed Levine’s memorable opening salvo:Paris has its baguettes and Dublin its soda bread. San Francisco trades heavily in sourdough, while New Orleans greets each morning with beignets. It wouldn't be Philadelphia without soft pretzels and it couldn't be Bonn without pumpernickel. But no city, perhaps in the history of the world, is so closely identified with a breadstuff as New York is with the bagel.Levine also notes that in those early days of the 1900s in NYC, the hole in the bagel served a very practical purpose: bagels were stacked up with a stick or a string through their centers, making it easier to carry and sell them on the street.In 1927, Harry Lender opened a wholesale bagel bakery in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1956, Harry’s son Murray discovered that bagels could be frozen and thereby produced in bulk, before delivering to retailers, six to the bag (the plastic bag also making its baleful appearance in the 1950s).Part of the point of Nathan’s article is that the burgeoning popularity of bagels in the mid-20th century was due to the fact that ‘unlike Mexican burritos or Chinese egg rolls, they don’t taste ethnic.’ Despite Nathan’s having opened with a reference to her family’s Jewish cultural roots (and despite her well-received 1994 cookbook Jewish Cooking in America, along with the PBS television series based on it), this may sound suspiciously anti-semitic. But I take it that Nathan is asserting that bagels helped prepare the way for a broader American acceptance of ethnic foods that do taste ethnic: ‘At some point … their position from the Jewish bun to the American breakfast food shifted.’As the Freemans note, ‘a bagel makes breakfast almost worth getting up for.’ (By the time of their NYT article, in 1960, 250,000 bagels per day were being made in NYC, seven days a week; that number must be dizzyingly higher now.) But even in 1960, the expansion of the bagel’s popularity was sufficiently new and noteworthy that the Freemans would put it this way: ‘just as the pizza has found favor with non-Italians, so the bagel is winning friends among non-Jews here.’The central position of NYC in the development of bagels is thrown into high relief when one considers what qualifies as a bagel across the USA. Ed Levine’s baldly-stated definition, cited above, articulates the purist position: there is simply no such thing as, for example, a ‘cinnamon-raisin bagel’ or a ‘blueberry bagel’ (Levine calls the latter a ‘Midwestern depredation’). Such variants (or, as some would put it, ‘mutants’) are still the objects of pure scorn in the Five Boroughs: as Margalit Fox puts it, ‘To these stalwarts […] even invective-rich Yiddish lacks words critical enough to describe a machine-made bagel, though “shande” — disgrace — perhaps comes closest.’But this kind of prescriptive definition, whatever its exactitude, fails to recognize that foodways — above all, when they burst their cultural bounds and become the foodways of new eating communities — are kaleidoscopic in their ability to morph, adapt, and develop. (Hence, for example — whatever one may think of it — the controversial rise of the ‘pineapple pizza.’) Levine does close his essay by acknowledging that the ‘bagel pantheon’ includes a broadening number of variations from the canonical NYC plain, salt, poppy-seed, and sesame-seed versions (though, at least whimsically, he draws the line at sun-dried tomato bagels).As Weinzweig notes, such changes in the actual characteristics of the bagel came along with their growing popularity:Over the course of the 20th century, bagels followed the pattern of so many other ethnic foods still superficially “Jewish” — they got softer and sweeter as they moved out of New York’s Lower East Side into the middle of the country and the mass market. Hand shaping shifted to machine rolling; boiling was switched to the less time consuming steaming; bakeries opted out of stone ovens in favor of standard steel. The results of all these “efficiencies” were the soft, round breads more akin to a sort of savory donut than the chewy, crusty, hand shaped, boiled ones that came over with my grandparents’ generation.Those early-1900s bagels, according to Levine, each weighed only three ounces or so, and were made from two-inch strips of a dough composed solely of high-gluten flour, water, yeast, salt, and malt syrup. Before the actual baking, they were boiled ‘for less than a minute, which gave the bagel its tight skin and eventual shine.’ According to Levine, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett attributed to national bagel chains (such as Bagel Nosh, Einstein Brothers, and Brueggers) the desire to keep pace with the ‘supersizing’ trend of the 1980s. This, she said, led them to increase the size of their bagels from that of the smaller early-period New York bagels.But — according to Matthew Goodman, as cited by Margalit Fox — the history of American bagel-making is most markedly divided by Daniel Thompson’s watershed invention, in the early 1960s, of the automated bagel-making machine. As Fox notes: ‘Where a traditional bagel baker could produce about 120 bagels in an hour, Mr. Thompson’s machine let a single unskilled worker turn out 400.’ Lender’s Bagels leased their first Thompson machine in 1963; by 2015 they were producing 750 million bagels a year, still using Thompson equipment.Should you eat a bagel? My advice is an emphatic YES. Are ‘authentic’ bagels superior to all other versions? Again — though this may be more controversial — I say YES. Will you be able to buy ‘authentic’ bagels where you live? Possibly not; but if you can bake, you can make your own and have them, fresh out of the oven, whenever you like.There are, of course, innumerable bagel recipes, both in print and online; as a starting-point you might enjoy Kamran Siddiqi’s New York-Style Bagels Recipe which includes step-by-step instructions and photographs. (While I am recommending, I urge you to follow his tip about using powdered barley malt rather than sugar: this will take you as close as possible to the purist’s strict guidelines, spiriting you back to the streets of old New York. Malt powder, as well as malt syrup, can be readily purchased online; if you decide to use the syrup form, you may need to slightly adjust the amount of water in the recipe.) A version that does call for malt syrup is Marie’s NY Style Bagel Recipe on her ‘Feeling Foodish’ website.Despite my passion for ‘authenticity,’ I will close with a suggestion that may strike some purists as radical (if not a complete and utter shande): If, in keeping with the current vogue for sourdough baking — about which you can read a lot more here — you would like to try making a sourdough bagel that nonetheless hews closely to the traditional New-York style (including the parboiling step that qualifies these as ‘water bagels’), you could try this recipe for New York Style Sourdough Bagels on Kris Osborne’s BAKED site — or this one by Paul on yumarama.com.FURTHER READINGBalinska, Maria. The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.Bold, Cambria. ’Expert Bagel Maker Confirms: You Don’t Need Lye To Make a Good Bagel.’ Kitchn, May 8, 2014.Fox, Margalit. ‘Daniel Thompson, Whose Bagel Machine Altered the American Diet, Dies at 94.’] New York Times, Sept. 21, 2015.Freeman, Beatrice and Ira Henry. ‘About: Bagels.’ New York Times Magazine, May 22, 1960, 93–94.Goodman, Matthew. Jewish Food: The World at Table. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.Levine, Ed. ‘Was Life Better When Bagels Were Smaller?,’ New York Times, December 31, 2003. Was Life Better When Bagels Were Smaller?Nathan, Joan. Jewish Cooking in America: A Cookbook. New York: Knopf, 1994, revised 1998. (This book provided the basis for the PBS series Jewish Cooking in America.)— ‘A short history of the bagel.’ Slate, November 12, 2008.Weinzweig, Ari. ‘The Secret History of Bagels.’ Atlantic Monthly, March 26, 2009. (Weinzweig is co-founder of the Michigan-based Zingerman's Community of Businesses [https://www.zingermans.com] for which I cannot find adequate praise.)Wikipedia entry. ‘Bagel.’