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Jennie Rothenberg Gritz

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz - Jennie Rothenberg Gritz is an Atlantic senior editor. More

Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, an Atlantic senior editor, began her association with the magazine in 2002, shortly after graduating from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. An early highlight of her Atlantic career was a visit with Harold Bloom, during which the renowned literary critic addressed her as "my little bear."

In January 2006, Jennie joined the Atlantic staff full time. She currently oversees a number of different areas -- producing the online edition of the magazine and its special features, editing TheAtlantic.com's National channel, and creating original videos for the website.

Before coming to The Atlantic, Jennie was senior editor of Moment, a national magazine founded by Elie Wiesel, where she remains a contributing editor. Her writing has also appeared in The Chicago Tribune and in the book The Kindness of Strangers, a Lonely Planet travel writing anthology.

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Ghosts of Halloween Past

By Jennie Rothenberg Gritz

Oct 28 2011, 11:30 AM ET Comment

From the Kennedy children to cross-dressing witches, a gallery of costumes and trickery in mid-century America

halloween-top2.jpg

Archive Photos/Getty Images

Jack o' lanterns and haunted houses, broomsticks and black cats -- these images are so synonymous with October that it's easy to forget Halloween wasn't always on the American calendar. Our Puritan ancestors knew about Samhain, the Celtic spirit festival, but they didn't exactly approve of it. It took two million Irish immigrants fleeing famine in the 1840s to bring All Hallows' Eve stateside. (Back in the Old Country, they'd been in the habit of carving jack o' lanterns from potatoes, but they willingly made the switch to pumpkins.) 

A hundred years later, in the mid-20th century, Halloween was a major American holiday. The religious overtones were gone, but the costumes and pranks remained, along with an eerie thrill of mysticism. These photos, courtesy of LIFE.com, capture some of the now-ubiquitous Halloween traditions that were becoming mainstream then: trick-or-treating, haunted houses, party games, and ghost stories. 

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