Articles from 1919
Figures were presented at the National Lynching Conference showing that in the last thirty years 3,224 persons have been killed by lynching, 2,834 of them in Southern states which once were slave-holding.
Disgusted with being remembered for only playing the role of vampires, Theda Bara wrote this piece where she listed several sound reasons as to why she would never play such a roll again:
To me, there is nothing so quaintly naive as this inability of the moving picture public to disassociate the screen personality of a star from his or her own personality. I wonder what they think a Mack Sennett bathing girl must be like around the house.
Sergeant Alexander Woollcott (1887 – 1943) wrote this article so that his New York readers (whom he had not addressed since signing on with the Doughboys) would know the key roll Corporal Harold Ross (1892 – 1951) played as Managing Editor at the Paris offices of The Stars & Stripes. Anyone who glances at those now brittle, beige pages understands how sympathetic the The Stars & Stripes and their readers were to the many thousands of French children orphaned by the war; Woollcott makes it clear that it was Harold Ross who was behind the A.E.F. charities that brought needed relief to those urchins.
It seems certain that no man in the A.E.F. had a greater influence on it’s thought and spirit…The men who worked with him on The Stars & Stripes considered him the salt of the earth.
To read another W.W. I article by Alexander Woocott, click here.
Written during the closing days of the paper’s existence, the reporting journalist could not emphasize enough how lousy the paper was with enlisted men serving in the most important positions. You will come away with a good amount of knowledge concerning the manner in which THE STARS & STRIPES crew addressed their daily duties and still made it to the presses on time. Surprising is the high number of experienced newspapermen who wrote for the paper during the paper’s short existence.
Click here to read World War II articles from YANK MAGAZINE.
A few historians tend to believe that the sobriquet Doughboy had it’s origins in the 1846 – 48 war with Mexico (a perversion of the Spanish word ‘adobe’), but the attached article makes a different reference, dating the term to the American army’s period in the Philippines. An effort was also made to explain the term Buck Private.
Click here if you would like to read an article about the Doughboy training camps.
If you’ve been jumping from site-to-site for the past twenty minutes looking for reliable information regarding the early career of a silent film actor of the U.K. persuasion who was known as James Knight (1891 – 1948) – you have found it. Click the title above, gaze at the digitized image of his smiling mug and read on!
A black and white photograph illustrating one of the many iron tree stumps used throughout the war which served as field observation posts. It was in the night, when work was done by both sides to preserve and refortify their respective trenches that objects such as these were erected.
Being the story of the second of the three splendid achievements of the United States Navy in the World War: the laying of the greatest submarine mine barrier in all history, which effectually prevented the Kaiser’s U-boats from leaving their secret bases for the steamer lanes of the Atlantic.
It was Lt. Commander Norman Wilkinson (1878 – 1971) of the Royal Navy who deduced that white (reflecting blue at night) was a suitable base color for naval camouflage. Wilkinson based his reasoning on the snow-capped iceberg that made such quick work of TITANIC, remembering all the while that seagulls are white, as are pelicans and the Antarctic Petrels. When the war broke out, his findings were presented to the Admiralty and it was concluded that elements of the North Atlantic fleet should be so painted. They added the black in order that the ships appear gray on the horizon.
This paragraph was lifted from a longer article regarding the battle-savvy Native Americans of World War One and it supports the claims made in 1918 by a number of anonymous allied POW’s who reported seeing female soldiers in German machine gun crews toward the close of the war. The article appeared after the Armistice and this was a time when The Stars and Stripes editors were most likely to abstain from printing patriotic hooey.
If you would like to read another article about women combatants in W.W. II, click here.
