1916

Articles from 1916

With the Germans on the Somme (The Cambridge Magazine, 1916)

Throughout much of World War I, the German-American war correspondent Karl Von Wiegand (1874 – 1961) reported on the goings-on within the Kaiser’s Army for an American new syndicate. As luck would have it, he happened to be in a front line German trench when the British Army launched their enormous attack on July 1, 1916. Here is one of his earlier dispatches from the German side:


We stood awe-stricken. Mankind, like Frankenstein, was being devoured by the monster it had created.

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‘Let’s Go to the Moving Photograph Show!” (Motion Picture Magazine, 1915)

Attached is the reminiscence of a movie-goer named Homer Dunne who recalled his feelings upon first attending a moving photograph show during the closing days of the Nineteenth Century. He described well the appearance of the rented shop-front, the swanky ticket-taker, the unimpressed audience and has a laugh on himself for failing to understand the significance of the medium.

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Equestrian Attire (Vanity Fair Magazine 1916)

1916 was a poor year if you happened to be a German sailor off the coast of Denmark; it was a terrible year if you were in the infantry on the Somme or near Verdun but if you were an American man fond of horseback riding and you happened to have been shopping for the perfect riding suit on Madison Avenue, then OldMagazineArticles.com is quite certain that 1916 was a great year for you!

If you would like to read another article about men’s equestrian attire, please click here.

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An Interview with Woodrow Wilson (Collier;s Magazine, 1916)

In 1916 Ida Tarbell (1857 – 1944) interviewed President Woodrow Wilson and came away with these impressions:

The common things of life interest him, and this fact somewhere strengthens enormously the estimate which any candid examination of his career forces, and that is that here at last we have a president whose real interest in life centers around the common man and on whom we can count to serve that man so far as his ability goes.

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Silent Films and the Lexicographers (Motion Picture Magazine, 1916)

This small notice appeared on the pages of the March, 1916, issue of MOTION PICTURE MAGAZINE reporting that the overwhelming popularity of the new entertainment medium, and the public’s curiosity with the manner in which they are produced, is beginning to have an impact on the everyday language of the English-speaking world:

When a thing takes hold of a whole people its idiom enters the language; its individual verbiage begins to limber-up the common speech.

So the idiom of active photography has entered the English language, at least wherever the English language is Americanized. The self-conscious valedictorian is told not ‘to look into the camera’. The reporter writing of a street murder terms his description of the underlying cause a ‘cut-back’.

– and most interestingly, one of the most popular elements of Hollywood verbiage is mentioned as having been noticed by the lexicographers: close-up.

The N.Y. TIMES reported that the verb to film was entered into the dictionary in 1914,.

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