Recent Articles

The Armistice Day Offensive (The Home Sector, 1920)

A Congressional committee of investigation has recently been treated to a scathing arraignment of the General Staff because military operations on the front of the Second Army were continued up to the hour of the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. Members of the operations Section of the Staff, particularly the chief, Brigadier General Fox Conner, have been accused of slaughtering men on the last day of the war in order to satisfy their personal ambitions.

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11/11 with the U.S. First Division (American Legion Weekly, 1919)

A 1919 article that recalled the U.S. Army’s First Division Armistice Day assault in the Bois de Romaigne:


The First Division was a pretty tired outfit. It had seen eleven months of almost continuous fighting…Rumors were around that there was going to be an armistice, but few listened and none believed. We had been bunked before.

The artillery fire increased and the machine guns rattled. You were on outpost and you fired your rifle, just fired it at nothing in particular. Everybody was doing it. The din increased until 11 o’clock, it ended with a crash that startled you. Fini la Guerre?

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The News of the Armistice (The Stars and Stripes, 1918)

By the time this column was read by the American Doughboys, the truce was old news and this STARS AND STRIPES article makes for an interesting read as it imparts much of the November, 1918 excitement that filled the streets of Paris when the news of the Armistice hit the previously gloomy boulevards. This front-page article makes clear that many of the rumors pertaining to the German collapse could not be verified, yet affirms reports concerning the revolution in Germany, it’s food shortages and the Kaiser’s exile to Holland.

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The Wrong Armistice Day (Yank Magazine, 1945)

In the attached 1945 article an anonymous YANK MAGAZINE correspondent describes for his young readers how the last World War ended; the widely reported misinformation of a premature armistice treaty that was reported as being signed on November 7, 1918 – the retraction, and the subsequent announcement of the genuine armistice being signed four days later. General John J. Pershing recalled the scene in Paris:

It looked as though the whole population had gone out of their minds. The city turned into pandemonium. The streets and boulevards were packed with people singing and wearing all sorts of odd costumes. The crowds were doing the most clownish things. One could hardly hear his own voice, it was such bedlam.

Click here to read another article describing the Armistice Day celebrations in 1918 Paris.

Click here to read an explanation as to what was understood about the truce of November 11, 1918.

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A Pat on the Back for the GIs (Coronet Magazine, 1945)

So they’ve given up.

They’re finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the the Wilhelmstrasse.

Take a Bow, GI – take a bow, little guy.

Far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free, rousing out of their habits and their homes – got up early one morning, flexed their muscles, learned the manual of arms (as amateurs) and set out across perilous oceans to whop the bejeepers out of the professionals.

And they did.

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Murray Korman (PM Tabloid, 1942)

Brilliant photographer Ralph Steiner (1899 – 1986) spent some time examining the photographs of Murray Korman (1902 – 1961) and, to his surprise, came away finding his work to be very interesting:

Murray Korman is the man whose pictures you see outside the musical shows and in girlie magazines… After four hours of looking I was dizzy. I figured that no man could take such pictures for 17 years and get satiated with lusciousness and bored by the sameness of the girls. I figured that all that kept Korman going was the profit motive. But when I went to his studio on Broadway I found I was all wrong.

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Trying to Understand Learning Disabilities (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

The kids who are discussed in this article would be called LD today – you don’t want to know how they were referred to in the early Twenties. Back then there were no Federally-funded commissions thronging with sympathetic PhD candidates to ramble on about convergence issues, processing concerns, the-classroom-learning-environment and the Learning Disabled. There were only frustrated kids, frustrated teachers and broken-hearted parents. This 1937 news article reports on the pioneering teachers at Seward Park High School in New York City and the earliest attempts to address the needs of students who suffered from language processing disorders, dyscalculia, dyslexia, dysgraphia and America’s favorite – good ol’ ADHD.

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FDR: The First One Hundred Days (Literary Digest, 1933)

Here are the Chief accomplishments of the special Session of the 73rd Congress, March 9 – June 16, 1933


These fifteen pieces of legislation were called the Honeymoon Bills – his critics pointed out that not one of them originated in Congress and added to their argument that Congress had been marginalized during the earliest period of his presidency.


FDR’s critics had a thing or two to say about the first year of The New Deal…


Click here to read about FDR and the press.

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