Articles from The Literary Digest
Musical historian W.S.B. Mathews considers the three musical styles of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827) and entirely dismisses the possibility that his deafness in later years effected his compositions not one jot.
Attached herein is the obituary of a remarkable woman and early feminist: Belva Lockwood (1830 – 1917) was the first woman lawyer to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. A graduate of Genesee College, she was the nominee from the Equal Rights Party of the Pacific to run for President during the 1884 U.S. election.
Aside from scanning and posting vast numbers of historic magazine articles, the only other activity that has heightened our sense of inner tranquility has been our various walks through British and Commonwealth World War I graveyards. They are truly unique and beautiful gardens that can be appreciated on a number of different levels and it was not surprising to learn that many of the finest aesthetic minds in Britain had a hand in their creation.
This article, printed six months after the last shot was fired, is about the Imperial War Graves Commission (now called The Commonwealth War Graves Commission) and their plans as to how the dead of the British Empire were to be interred.
Click here to read about a 1920 visit the grave of poet Rupert Brooke.
Pictured in the attached PDF file is a seldom-seen black and white photograph depicting the deflated remains of an unidentified W.W. I German zeppelin as it rested on the tree tops of a French forest after having been forced from the skies.
As 1922 came to a close, it seemed that some of the Suffragettes of the old-school had not lost their taste for violence, as the reader will discover in the opening paragraph of this one page article that primarily focused on the defeat of all but one of the women candidates who ran for Federal offices in the 1922 elections. Thirty-three women running for Congressional and legislative seats in New York State went down to defeat and there were no women elected or re-elected from any state for Congress that year. However, the state of Ohio elected it’s first woman to that state’s Supreme Court: Florence E. Allen (1884–1965).
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891 – 1915) was an avant-garde sculptor of the Vorticist school. Prior to the war he resided in London and broke bread with the talented Bohemians of that burg, and this article is composed of snippets of text from a remembrance written by his close friend, Ezra Pound.
Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) served as one of France’s wartime Premieres (1917-1920). The following is an excerpt from his letter to the American people imploring them to share in his outrage concerning Germany’s open contempt for their obligations agreed to under the Versailles Treaty. Clemenceau would die seven years later, fully convinced that another devastating war with Germany was just around the corner.
Click here if you would like to read about the 1936 Versailles Treaty violations.
What was called a Japanese ‘Monroe Doctrine for Asia’ whereby Japan would wield dominance there, especially in Chinese affairs, was announced last April, and drew the immediate attention of the world’s press.
In the last days of this January a following-up of this intention was seen in a series of talks at Nanking between Chiang Kai-shek, President and Generalissimo of the Nationalist Government of China, and Lieutenant-General Soshiyuki Suzuki, Japanese military representative at Shanghai; and among Akira Ariyoshi, Japanese Minister to China, and General Chiang and Premiere Wang Ching-wei.
Jerome K. Jerome (1859 – 1927) was a British author and playwright from one of the sillier tribes who is best remembered for his humorous travelogue Three Men in a Boat (1889). In the attached interview, the humorist laments that the novels in his day (as opposed to our own) so seldom inspire any real use of the mind:
Books have become the modern narcotic. China has adopted the opium habit for want of fiction. When China obtains each week her ‘Greatest Novel Of The Century’, her ‘Most Thrilling Story Of The Year’, her ‘Best Selling Book Of The Season’ the opium den will be no more needed.
From Amazon: Three Men in a Boat
Premier Vyacheslav M. Molotov (1890 – 1986) pictured the Soviet Union as a lusty young giant strong enough to defend itself from both the East and the West in the keynote speech of the Seventh All Union Congress of Soviets, the Soviet Parliament.
In proof of this claim it was shown that in the last two years the Soviet Government had increased the strength of the Red Army from 562,000 men in 1932 to 940,000 in 1934.
Read about all the various international treaties that the Soviet Union violated…
Egged on by the 1929 completion of the Chrysler building, the curious souls who ran the New York offices of THE LITERARY DIGEST were moved to learn more about skyscrapers, both in New York as well as other parts of the U.S. and We were surprised to learn that as of 1929
50 percent of the buildings in New York from 10 to 20 stories and 60 percent of those over 20 stories are located between 14th and 59th streets.
This article also presents statistical data concerning the number of tall buildings that could be found throughout the 1920s United States.
A magazine interview highlighting the tennis career of Suzanne Lenglen
Mille. Lenglen was a remarkable French tennis player who won 31 Grand Slam titles from 1914 through 1926. She is remembered as the the first high-profile European woman tennis star to go professional: in 1912 she was paid $50,000.00 to play a series of matches against Mary K. Browne (1891 – 1971). This article concentrates on her supreme confidence and overwhelming determination to win.
When prest as to whether she liked a tonic, or say just a
little wine, before her matches, Mile. Lenglen admitted that she
did and that she had been promised that it would be obtained
for her in the United States. Despite the fact that she is in an
arid land Suzanne praised the effect of this stimulant on her
game.
‘Nothing, she said, is so fine for the nerve, for the strength
for the morale. A little wine tones up the system just right.
One can not always be serious. There must be some sparkle, too.’
This 1917 article listed the known body count of dead poets who were rotting away in no-man’s land. A number of the scribes are unknown in our era; among the prominent names are Alan Seeger, Julian Grenfel and Rupert Brooke.
Printed in a popular U.S. magazine, it appeared on the newsstands the same week that Wilfred Owen, the most well known of World War I poets, was discharged from Craiglockhart Hospital, where he first resolved to write poetry about his experiences in the war.
By enlarge, this article is a mildly technical piece that compares the German sniper scopes used during W.W. I to those of the British; happily, the amusing part of this essay is contained in the opening paragraph in which a British Tommy returning from the front, is quoted as exclaiming:
German snipers are better shots than the English because their rifles have telescopic sights that are illuminated at night.
Two articles from 1917 heaped praise upon the laureled cranium of the British war correspondent Philip Gibbs (1877 – 1962). Having written diligently for the readers of the DAILY MAIL and DAILY CHRONICLE, who were also anticipating his book THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME (1917), Gibbs was admitted to the VANITY FAIR Hall of Fame (for whatever that was worth at the time):
He has been able to bring the wide, modern, romantic outlook to bear in his survey and analysis of fighting and the conditions of fighting…He is a war-correspondent of a ‘new dispensation’, giving ‘not a realistic or a melodramatic vision of war, but a naturalistic vision’.
At the close of hostilities in 1918, Philip Gibbs was filled with disgust concerning his cooperation with the censors and would begin writing NOW IT CAN BE TOLD (1920), in which he angrily names the bunglers in command and admits that he wrote lies all through the war.
This article listed the skills required to survive as a sniper in W.W. I France:
One extremely important rule was that he should swab the muzzle of his rifle after every shot, to make sure that no moisture had collected there. One tiny drop of water would, upon the rifle’s discharge, send up a puff of steam that would reveal him to his carefully watching enemies.
To see a diagram of the American W.W. I sniper rifle, click here.
During the 1913 Battle of Gettysburg’s fiftieth anniversary commemoration, a surviving member of Picket’s Charge encountered the Federal soldier who had saved his life at the Bloody Angle; this is the moving story of their encounter.
(Due to the broken title link above, you must Click here to read the article)
