Articles from Harper’s Weekly
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A two column item on anti-Semitism
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.
A short, uncredited article written in response to a report by Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) concerning a series of lynchings in 1914. There is a minute breakdown, by state, showing where each of the murders took place.
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.
In a letter to his family, a soldier from one of the Scottish territorial regiments gives an account of his experiences fighting in Belgium.
He was in the thick of the fighting that came as a result of the Kaiser’s desperate attempt to take Ypres, yet he indulges in no heroics. He writes as though reporting a cricket game or a boat race.
President Abraham Lincoln told many parables during the Civil War; he told this one to General A.J. Cresswell on the last day of his life.
To read the story behind Lincoln’s beard, click here.
