Americana

Find Magazine Articles on Americana. Our Site Has Information from Old Magazine and Newspaper Articles about American Culture and American Trivia

It’s Superman! (Coronet Magazine, 1946)

Attached is a 1946 article by Mort Weisinger (1915 – 1978), who is remembered primarily as the editor for DC Comics’ Superman throughout much of the Fifties and Sixties. His four page history of Superman, attached herein, lays out not simply the origins of the character but all his great successes when deployed on behalf of the enemies of bad grammar, tooth decay, and slot machines. The author lucidly explained his own amazement at the fact that during those years spanning 1936 through 1946, Superman not only fought tooth and nail for truth, justice and the American way, but had been successfully harnessed by numerous ad men to advocate for the study of geography, civics, literacy, vocabulary and the importance of iron salvage in wartime.
At the time Weisinger penned this article, SUPERMAN was purchased annually by as many as 30,000,000 buyers.


Click here to read about the roll comic books played during the Second World War.

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America’s Ever-Changing Mind: 1929 – 1952 (Pageant Magazine, 1953)

In an effort to show how American thought can vary between decades, a retired pollster from the Gallup organization collected the data gleaned from various opinion polls that were launched between 1929 on up through the dawn of the Atomic Age in order to show what a different people we had become. The topics that were addressed were


• Racial tolerance


• Taxes


• Women in the work place


• Labor unions


• Women smoking

• Bathing Suits

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America’s Favorite Illustrator (Pageant Magazine, 1947)

Norman Rockwell (1894 – 1978) once remarked in an interview:


“The view of life I communicate in my pictures excludes the sordid and the ugly. I paint life as I would like it to be.”


– and his vision was shared with millions of Americans. He had a fondness for depicting everyday life in small town America, childhood friendships, family life, middle school sporting events and (as discussed in the attached article) the Boy Scouts. He knew who he was; he never referred to himself as an artist, he called himself an illustrator.

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Popcorn Finds a Home at the Movies (Quick Magazine, 1952)

Popcorn was introduced as a snack food to American movie-goers as a result of the candy shortages during the earliest years of the Second World War.


Attached is a petite notice documenting the fact that the substitute was a wise one:

By 1952, movie houses accounted for about one-third of the nation’s annual $350 million retail popcorn sales.


Reference is also made to the efforts that were made to secure noiseless popcorn bags.


If popcorn replaced sweets on the home front, what replaced steak?

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American Love is Better (People Today Magazine, 1955)

This article is based on the research of Paul Popenoe (1888 – 1979), and the American Sociological Society that pointed out the high STD rate in Europe at the time indicated that the first sexual experiences among the males of that continent were with prostitutes. Two additional factors in the author’s argument highlighted the alarmingly high suicide rate among young European women coupled with the fact that the illegitimate birthrate far outpaced that of the United States at that time. Illustrated with four images that depict how depraved European dating in the Fifties was and how darn wholesome American teenage dating used to be by comparison, this article presents some sociological data supporting the conclusion that American love is better than European love because the American approach to the topic was simply easier and Europeans are just a bunch of pervs.

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