Articles from 1915
During the Spring of 1915 Mme. Parisienne had decided that it was time to add some gaiety into her wardrobe. Since August of the previous summer there had been such bad news and although the rationing of fabric continued, there was still much available for the asking.
Click to read about the U.S. fabric rationing during W.W. II.
Paris Fashion: Spring, 1915 (Vanity Fair, 1915) Read More »
Originally appearing in the Berlin Tageblatt, this dispatch, written by Bernhard Kellerman (1879 – 1951), was later translated and printed in the The N.Y. Times magazine, Current History. It reported on the hardships and morale of German infantry serving in Flanders during the second year of the war.
The View from the German Trenches (NY Times, 1915) Read More »
An excerpt from a British tailoring journal which explains what the garment is and is not. The illustrations show a long forgotten pattern with billows pockets and excessively long cuffs, which were intended to be gathered by wrist straps. You will also note that the trench coat is bereft of D rings and gas flaps and other fantasy elements of military-tailoring.
One Tailor’s Encounter with the Trench Coat (West End Gazette, 1915) Read More »
Attached is a Vanity Fair article printed a few months after the Lusitania sinking in which the journalist listed the many and myriad explanations as to why this event was such a departure from the traditions of naval warfare set in place by John Paul Jones, Admirals Nelson and Dewey.
Click here to read read a 1919 German condemnation of Admiral Von Tirpitz.
The Lusitania Attack and the Violation of Naval Traditions (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1915) Read More »
Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), said to be the birth mother of Modern Dance, is profiled in the attached VANITY FAIR MAGAZINE article written by Arthur Hazlitt Perry:
She is truly a remarkable woman. She never dances, acts, dresses, or thinks like anybody else. She is essentially the child of another age, a Twentieth Century exponent of a by-gone civilization. She missed her cue to come on, by twenty-three hundred years.
A Profile of Isadora Duncan (Vanity Fair, 1915) Read More »
Horace M. Kallen (1888 – 1974) was a deep thinker who questioned the practice of Americanization (ie. assimilation). In this 1915 article, Kallen contended that although immigrants to American shores are required to develop allegiances to certain self-evident beliefs that are embraced throughout our republic – but outside of that, there is no reason that immigrants should not be able to maintain their own ethnic and cultural identities. In the Eighties, those who embraced this line of thinking preferred to call America a salad bowl as opposed to a melting pot.
Anticipating Multiculturalism (The Nation, 1915) Read More »
Attached is one American journalist’s view of the Great War as it is waged on the home-front by the British people. He was impressed with the resolve of the population to win the war and he found that everyone, regardless of age or infirmity, was pursuing war work with a surprising earnestness.
The outward evidences of a nation at war are plentiful in London. Soldiers are everywhere. Columns of armed men and columns of recruits still in civilian clothes march through the streets. Drilling goes on in the parks and other places all day and every day.
Read about how the First World War effected life on the campus of Eton College.
The British Home Front Observed (Harper’s Weekly, 1915) Read More »
One year prior to being elected as the 25th governor of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (1876 – 1935), while serving as the chairman of the University Commission on the Southern Race Question, submitted his opinion regarding racial segregation in the Annual Report that he had written for that organization. Dr. Brough, who at the time was a professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Arkansas, condemned the Jim Crow laws that had separated Whites from Blacks, believing that no good could ever spring from it:
In my humble opinion, it is better to admit the negro to all the stimulus and the inspiration of the white’s social heritage, so far as it applies to economic equality of opportunity given through industrial education, in so far as it does not endanger the integrity of the social heritage itself, than to encourage an ignorant and debased citizenship by his neglect and repression.
Brough Called Out for Racial Parity (New York Times, 1915) Read More »
Sporting terms used as a metaphors for war are very common and come naturally to those who tend to think about matters military on a regular basis; yet this article uses the expression, playing the game more as a character trait that was unique to the British. The author, Austin Harrison, writing in 1915 (the year of grim determination) believed that the English have always played the game as a matter of course; they have always maintained good form, and yet:
Playing the game is only half the battle in war [and]…it will be the finest game we ever have played.
‘Playing the Game” (The English Review, 1915) Read More »
Here is a numeric account, estimated by the Germans, indicating how much of Europe was conquered and occupied by their army on the first anniversary of World War One. The report also accounts for the amount of land being occupied by the Entente powers, and the number of Allied prisoners, machine guns and artillery pieces taken by the central powers within this same time frame. The report was interpreted by the Berlin-based American Association of Commerce before being filed in its entirety by the Associated Press.
The Ground Taken by the German Armies (NY Times, 1915) Read More »
