Harper’s Weekly

Articles from Harper’s Weekly

The State of Women’s Suffrage in 1907 (Harper’s Weekly, 1907)

This 1907 article refers to a report made by journalist and suffragist Ida Husted Harper (1851 – 1931), concerning the status of the suffrage movement as it could be found throughout the Western world. A number of interesting issues and seldom remembered concerns are sited throughout this article on the matter of the bullying and boorish ways of those wishing to hamper the advancement of women’s suffrage.

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The British Home Front Observed (Harper’s Weekly, 1915)

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.

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Titanic Verses (The Bookman, 1912)

The Titanic catastrophe was not seen by many to be a poetic topic, however there were a few wordsmiths who did address the subject. The link above will lead you to two of these poems; one by Charles Hanson Towne (1877 – 1949), a poet, essayist and playwright who, at the time of the sinking, was serving as an editor at Designer magazine. The second poem was penned by M.C. Lehr, of whom there is no surviving information.

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Anti-Asian Riots (Harper’s Weekly, 1907)

The cheap yellow and brown men have driven out the Whites and Indians from the salmon fisheries and canneries, the farms and the mines.


– So reported the the Harper’s Weekly correspondent in the attached article that documented the 1907 anti-Asian race riots in Vancouver, British Columbia. Having visited San Francisco some time earlier, the journalist mused that similar mob-violence will result in the American West if the Federal Government does not take steps to soothe the racial tensions in some manner.

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Race Riots in Vancouver (Harper’s Weekly, 1907)

A Harper’s Weekly correspondent filed the attached report that served as an eye-witness account of the 1907 anti-Asian riots that flared up in the Canadian city of Vancouver, British Columbia. The riot triggered countless acts of violence and arson targeting the Asian communities of that western city. The widespread Asian migration to the Dominion of Canada was a result of the diplomatic agreements between Japan and Great Britain (Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902–1922) resulting in a tremendous amount of racist tension among Canadian Whites.


Today, the surname Li is the most common last name in Canada.


Click here to read about the Japanese-American internment camps of W.W. II.

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Lusitania and the Laws of the Sea (Harper’s Weekly, 1915)

Attached is a two column article pertaining to neutral states and the international laws of war as agreed upon at the Hague Convention of 1899.


This piece appeared three months prior to the infamous submarine attack on the ship and alludes to a little known matter involving Lusitania and the masquerade of flying the flags of non-combatant nations while crossing the Atlantic.

The ruse by which the Lusitania escaped the possible danger of submarines, the use of the American flag, has been resorted to over and over again in modern naval wars.

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Stage Productions Must Compete With Movies (Harper’s Weekly, 1915)

A thoughtful look at all that stage productions have had to learn while competing for audiences with the early (and exciting) Hollywood film industry:

There is no doubt that the moving picture was responsible for the disappearance of the second-class theatre devoted to traveling companies, giving lurid melodramas and plays of obvious sentiment [but] instead of taking a lesson from the history of this form of amusement, which it helped to kill, the moving picture theatre imitated one of it’s very worst features.

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German Anti-Semitism in 1915 (Harper’s Weekly, 1915)

A two column item on anti-Semitismstyle=border:none as it existed in Germany during World War I:

In the calamity of war we act now as if we were one heart and one soul with the Jews. However, and I am pained to say it, I must declare that the Jewish question remains and will perhaps, just because of the war, become still more acute. The Jews are a foreign people and are our opponents in France, Russia and England, together with the enormous means at their disposal.

Click here to read an article about the Warsaw Ghetto.

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Trench Medicine (Harper’s Weekly, 1915)

An informative article from World War I concerning the doctors of all the combatant nations and how they dealt with the filthy conditions of stagnant warfare and all the different sorts of wounds that were created as a result of this very different war:

This is a dirty war. Gaseous, gangrene, lockjaw, blood poisoning, all dirt diseases… Colonel G.H. Makins of the Royal Army Medical Corps longs for the clean dust of the Veldt, which the British soldier cursed in the Boer War.

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