Recent Articles

Women’s Football (Click Magazine, 1940)

Attached is a brief photo-essay documenting the short-lived experiment with women’s football in California:

Anything can and does happen in California, the proving ground for all sorts of fads and fancies. The latest craze sweeping the land of the Ham-and-Eggers is girl’s football. Discarding their all-revealing bathing suits, Hollywood and Los Angeles lassies have taken to padded moleskins, hip pads, shoulder pads, head gears and rubber-cleated brogans. The transition from beach nymph to gridiron amazon is called a revolution against oomph in the capital of streamlined pulchritude…regardless of what is said, powder-puff football seems destined to stay.

‘They Saw Hamburg Die” (Collier’s Magazine, 1943)

Here is a 1943 article that was cabled from Stockholm, Sweden, relaying assorted eyewitness accounts of the Allied bombing campaign over the German city of Hamburg in 1943:

The people of Germany have now learned, through the terror-filled hours of sleepless nights and days, that air mastery, the annihilating blitz weapon of the Nazis in 1939 and 1940, has been taken over by by the Allies…The most terrible of these punches has been the flood of nitroglycerin and phosphorus that in five days and nights destroyed Hamburg.


Click here to read about the bombing of Japan.


It was an Englishman nick-named Bomber Harris who planned and organized the nightly raids over Nazi Germany: click here to read about him.

Marcus Garvey: The Negro Moses (Literary Digest, 1922)

A profile of Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887 – 1940), Jr.; National Hero of Jamaica. During his lifetime Garvey worked as a publisher, a journalist, and an entrepreneur. A devoted Black nationalist and a black separatist, Marcus Garvey was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He rubbed a good many white folk the wrong way and this article from The Literary Digest covers much of his activities leading up to 1922.

The Great Depression and American Communists (Click Magazine, 1939)

This photo-essay tells the story of the radical elements within the United States during the later period of the Great Depression – all of them were directed and financed by Georgi Dimitrov (1882 – 1949) in far-off Moscow. The leaders of the American Communist Party USA (CPUSA) were William Z. Foster, Earl Browder, and Ella Reeve Bloor.


In 1944, the city of Seattle, Washington elected a communist to the U.S. House of Representatives, click here to read about him…


Click here to learn how thoroughly the FBI had infiltrated the CPUSA.


Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who pontificated on every street corner during the Great Depression…


Click here to read about the tactics that American Communists used in Hollywood during the Great Depression…


From Amazon: Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-1936,style=border:none

Andrew Mellon’s Gift (Art Digest, 1937)

A 1937 news column announced the very generous gift to Washington, D.C. and the nation made by billionaire philanthropist Andrew W. Mellon (1855 — 1937): The National Gallery of Art:

A long, low, classic structure, tailored in lines that harmonize with the neighboring white Beaux-Arts buildings, will house the new National Gallery made possible for the nation’s capital by Andrew W. Mellon. The plans, designed by John Russell Popestyle=border:none have already been accepted by the Fine Arts Commission and construction… will get underway as soon as congressional authorization is made… The cost of the building, which will be borne entirely by Mr. Mellon, is estimated at $9,000,000.


(The cost was actually $10,000,000)


Click here to read additional articles from the Twenties and Thirties about art.

1940s Makeup and W.W. II (Click Magazine, 1942)

Illustrated with thirteen pictures of the most popular U.S. makeup products used throughout the Forties, this article provides a fascinating look at how World War II effected the American cosmetic industry and how that same industry benefited the American war effort.


The U.S. cosmetics industry was effected in many ways, read the article and find out.


Click here to read a 1954 article about Marilyn Monroe.

‘They Dropped The A-Bomb On Me” (Tab Magazine, 1958)

During the Cold war, as many as 400,000 American military personnel were forced to witness Atomic explosions. Having been sworn to secrecy, this veteran wrote his testimony under the penname, Soldier X:

Then I saw the true power and fury of nature as a giant fireball sluggishly rolled upward through the thick layer of dust: I estimated its distance at about 1500 feet up. Surrounding the red mass are twisting white snakes of clouds….This is color as few humans have ever seen it, magnificent, threatening and horrible.

It All Began With Madame Curie (Literary Digest, 1921)

Here is a news article about Madame Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), it concerns the fact that although she discovered Radium, and conducted numerous important experiments upon it, she didn’t possess so much as a gram of the stuff. This problem was remedied by a coterie of American women of science who convened and agreed to provide her with the missing gram.

Jim Crow at Newsweek (Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

What a thoroughly outrageous article this is! In my experience reading news pieces from both world wars I have never once come across one in which the journalist pinpoints a particular fighting unit and labels it as substandard – but that is exactly what happens in this article about the all-black 92nd Division. Previously, I never thought such a thing would ever happen with a censored press that sought to preserve the morale of both soldiers and home front – but I was wrong.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Many Firsts (The Literary Digest, 1937)

This magazine article explains what a unique force in presidential history Eleanor Roosevelt was. She defied convention in so many ways and to illustrate this point, this anonymous journalist went to some length listing fifteen firsts that this most tireless of all First Ladies had racked-up through the years.


Those councilors who advised FDR and the First Lady on all matters African-American were popularly known as the Black Brain Trust…