Recent Articles

‘The Americans in the Argonne Won the War” (You Can’t Print That, 1929)



Here is a segment of the famous interview with General Paul von Hindenburg that was conducted just days after the close of hostilities in which the journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) posed the question as to which of the Allied Armies played the most decisive roll in defeating Germany; whereupon the General responded:


The American infantry in the Argonne won the war.


Read on…


Click here to read about sexually transmitted diseases among the American soldiers of the First World War…

‘The Americans in the Argonne Won the War” (You Can’t Print That, 1929) Read More »

‘The Grapes of Wrath” (Click Magazine, 1940)

The attached article is illustrated with three color photos from the set of the movie, this short article details why The Grapes of Wrath (Twentieth Century Fox, 1940) was such a different movie to come out of Hollywood and explains how thoroughly both the art and costume departments were in their research in depicting the migrant Okies in their Westward flight:

Realism, keynote of the book, was the keynote of the picture. Henry Fonda, who plays Tom Joad, lived for weeks among the Okie farmers from Oklahoma to understand their problems…

As a result of Steinbeck’s literary efforts, medical aid was offered to California’s migrants – Click here to read about it


Click here to read a 1935 article about the real Okies.


Perhaps Steinbeck saw this 1938 photo-essay while writing his novel?

John Steinbeck became a war correspondent in 1943.

‘The Grapes of Wrath” (Click Magazine, 1940) Read More »

Restraining The Terror In Georgia (The Literary Digest, 1921)

Whether Georgia Governor Hugh M. Dorsey (1871 – 1948) was overwhelmed by a sense of humanity or whether he simply wished to reduce the northern flow of African-Americans from his state in the Great Migration – we’ll never know, but the fact stands that in late April, 1921, the Governor stood before the State Committe on Race Relations and spoke of 135 instances in which Black citizens were unjustly treated by White Georgians (The Georgia Government document pertaining to his address can be read here).

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Paris Exults After Four Years of War (The Stars and Stripes, 1918)

A very moving column from the front page of the November 15, 1918 Stars and Stripes describing the joyous pandemonium that characterized the city of Paris when World War I came to a close:


And all Paris laughed the laugh of happy children after a day’s glad play. And the next day, and the next night, Paris sallied forth to romp and play again.


Click here to read about the W.W. II liberation of Paris.

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‘Why I Live in Paris” by a Former American Soldier (American Legion Monthly, 1927)

This piece was penned by an anonymous expatriate, a former American soldier of the Great War who went into some detail comparing life in 1920s Paris to the life he knew in America, and he is quite funny about it. He described a Paris that Hemingway, Stein and Fitzgerald didn’t talk about.


Back in America I sincerely thought that my hometown had the worst telephone system in the world. This was a colossal error…


Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

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Moholy-Nagy and the New Bauhaus (Coronet Magazine, 1941)

This unprepossessing place is the American survivor of a great international movement, the Bauhaus of Dessau, which filled the world with tubular chairs and sectional sofas. The Bauhaus, like so many other things German, drew Hitler’s ire because it was too intellectually independent. Hitler dissolved it in 1938…Some fragments of Bauhaus fled to America. Dr Laszalo Moholy-Nagy escaped with some remnants of students’ work and saught refuge in Chicago. There, in his concrete warehouse, Moholy-Nagy’s movement has taken root.

They do the oddest things…A chair might just be a double loop of shellacked plywood. It is steamed and shaped so that it has a seat, and a back, and stands on the floor…It doesn’t look like much of a chair. It will do the job for which chairs are sold.

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The Invention of the Car was Revolutionary (Vanity Fair Magazine, 1920)

As early as 1920, the number of automobiles was quickly growing throughout the Western world. In this very brief article, a journalist lays out how rapidly life was changing in the United States as a result of the horseless carriage.

The village smithy is no more. In the place of that interesting relic of a bygone day, there stands a substantial concrete building marked ‘Garage’…

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Dachau (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

Attached is Martha Gellhorn’s (1908 – 1998) very disturbing eyewitness account of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Poland:

Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged naked, nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German guards who had been found in this camp. They were killed at once by the prisoners when the American Army entered.


The man primarily responsible for delivering the innocent into the ovens of the death camps was Obergrupenfuehrer Albert Ganzenmüller click here to read about him…

Dachau (Collier’s Magazine, 1945) Read More »