1958

Articles from 1958

Yves Saint Laurent Takes Over the House of Dior (Coronet Magazine, 1958)

When Christian Dior died quite suddenly in 1957, the eggheads of the fashion world got their knickers in a twist as they wondered who would serve as the creative force for the great fashion house that he had established just ten years earlier; all eyes turned to his very young assistant, a 21 year old man named Yves Saint Laurent (1936 – 2008).


Click here to read a 1961 article about Jacqueline Kennedy’s influence on American fashion.

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PR from the Jungles of Cuba… (Coronet Magazine, 1958)

The last thing the aspiring Communist dictator Fidel Castro needed in the Fall of 1958 was to have the dreaded Yanquees breathing down his neck; and so to buy some time, he penned this seven page article for the easily-bamboozled editors of Coronet magazine and packed it full of hooey, with lines like:
A million unemployed bespeaks a terrible economic sickness which must be cured… lest it fester into communism. It was this article, among other deceptions, that made President Eisenhower believe that the new government of Cuba was deserving of diplomatic recognition in February of 1959. Less than two years later the Kennedy administration severed ties with the Cuban regime and shortly after launched an ill-fated attack on the island kleptocracy.

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The Onslaught of Standardized Tests (World Week, 1958)

Written in 1958 with the aid of the Educational Testing Service, (Princeton, New Jersey), the article attempted to persuade America’s high school students to get used to standardized tests because they’re a really cool idea and they’ll make your life better. Illustrations are provided to indicate how the testing work and how well such tests had proved useful to the Air Force in weeding out sub-standard candidates for flight training. The journalist seemed to imply throughout these columns that the egg-heads were really doing us all a big, big favor by creating these tests.

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The Submarine that Killed 9,400 People (Coronet Magazine, 1958)

This article recalls an event in W.W. II history that is still remembered today as the greatest maritime disaster of all time: January 30, 1945, when Soviet Navy submarine S-13 sank the German liner Wilhelm Gustloff as she fled the Danzig port overloaded with fleeing refugees.


Written 18 years after the attack, this article erroneously attributes the sinking to two submarines and killing 8,000; but this was not the case.

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The Great Civil War Battles (Pageant Magazine, 1958)

The second portion of Bruce Catton’s article (see above) concerning the necessary knowledge required in order to justifiably call your self a Civil War Buff was this short piece listing the greatest battles of the war. Accompanying the five brief thumb-nail summaries is a map of the South Eastern U.S., highlighted with red stars, which serve to identify where the blood poured.

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E-Learning in the Fifties (Pageant Magazine, 1958)

This article from the late Fifties refers to the educational benefits that existed in the form of tape recordings, television, films and slide shows and what a glorious discovery it was that they came along when they did to aid in the teacher shortages of the time. Today we have decades of studies that show what among these tools has been useful and what has failed.


In the 1940s Color TV was Anticipated as a Tool with Which Art Students Could Learn…

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