A five paragraph account regarding the royal families of Europe; how close they were prior to the war and the important roll played by Queen Victoria in maintaining the strong bond between them. One particular line of note:
Queen Victoria was the only human being whom the Kaiser feared.
Click here to read another article about the war and the royal families.
Conscription and Conscience
Attached is an article about the Charlie Chaplin film, Monsieur Verdux (1947) and the monstrous beast Henri Landru -the French murderer on whom the story is loosely based. This article was written by Gordon Kahn, remembered chiefly in our own time as one of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters of the post-World War II period. Not too long after this article was written he went into self-exile in Mexico.
Before there was an HSN or a QVC – before there was an Adam Freeman or a Mary Beth Roe, there was Your Television Shopper and Leave It To The Girls starring Maggie Johnson and Faye Emerson, respectively. The programs were two of several such shows that aired during the prepubescent days of television broadcasting – and like the shopping shows that came along fifty years later, they, too, moved products off the shelves at a surprising pace.
Click here to read how Hollywood costume designer affected popular fashion…
In the early Fifties many of the people from the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico decided to pack their bags and move to New York City. Overnight, it seemed, a portion of Harlem came to be known as Spanish Harlem – where hastily assembled mambo dance halls could be found among restaurants serving the exotic cuisine of the Caribbean. There were also complications that emerged with the new comers that are addressed in this 1955 article:
Today, however, there is a forceful change taking place, an influence so great that New York City officials have forecast a startling racial shift within a few years and are already making plans for meeting this switch…
Attached is a printable chronology of important events that took place four months prior to the American Civil War.
December, 1860, was a busy month for Secessionists, with all sorts of gatherings, hand shaking and back-slapping; while in Washington the elected representatives to the U.S. Congress from the state of South Carolina resigned.
In North Carolina, U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson (1805 – 1871) gets a sense of what is coming down the pike and removes his troops from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter.
The United States has always viewed the other American countries…with an invincible disdain – a disdain that could not remain a secret to the Young Latins, since it cannot be readily concealed; or, to speak more exactly it has never regarded the nations of Spanish and Portuguese origin as really it’s equal.
George Jean Nathan (1882 – 1958) and H.L. Mencken 
-Read an Article About the First World War and the Gratitude of France-
British thinker Bertrand Russell (1872-1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) used to get mighty hot under the collar when the topic of 1922 American society came up and this report is just one example. On a speaking tour in the United States, the Cambridge Professor opined that
love of truth [is] obscured in America by commercialism of which pragmatism is the philosophical expression; and love of our neighbor kept in fetters by Puritan morality.
He would have none of the thinking that America’s main concern for jumping into the meat grinder of 1914-1918 was entirely inspired by wounded France and poor little Belgium but was rather an exercise in American self-interest.
A short paragraph about the M-Dogs of the American Army during the Second World War and how they were trained to locate both plastic and metallic mines during the course of the war.
An additional paragraph can be read about the Hollywood starlet who volunteered her dog for military service, only to be informed that the pooch had given the last full measure on behalf of democracy and a grateful nation.
Click here to read an article about re-educating the captured German boys of the war.
