Recent Articles

The Crash (Coronet Magazine, 1946)

This is an article about the 1929 stock market crash – it was that one major cataclysmic event that ushered in the Great Depression (1929 – 1940). It all came crashing down on October 24, 1929 – the stocks offered at the New York Stock Exchange had lost 80% of their value; the day was immediately dubbed Black Thursday by all those who experienced it. When the sun rose that morning, the U.S. unemployment estimate stood at 3%; shortly afterward it soared to a staggering 24%.

In every town families had dropped from affluence into debt…Americans were soon to find themselves in an altered world which called for new adjustments, new ideas, new habits of thought, a new order of values. The Post-War Decade had come to its close. An era had ended. The era that followed was was the polar opposite of the one that had just gone down in flames: if the Twenties are remembered for confidence and prosperity, the Thirties was a decade of insecurity and want. The attached essay was penned by a popular author who knew the era well.


Yet, regardless of the horrors of The Crash, the United States was still an enormously wealthy nation…

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The Father of American Conservativism (Coronet Magazine, 1961)

Barry Goldwater (1909 – 1998) was the Republican presidential candidate for 1964, and although he lost that contest by wide margins to Lyndon Johnson, his political philosophy has played a vital roll in shaping the direction of American conservative thought. William F. Buckley, Jr. explained why in this article.


In 1887 The New York Times reviewed the first english edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it…

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Why Do Detergents Have Such Wacky Names (Pathfinder Magazine, 1952)

This column praises those brainiacs of Madison Ave who obsess over single syllable words (and sounds) in an effort to propel their client’s product to the tip-top of the profit-pantheon.

The right name can zoom a product into a commercial success. The wrong one can wreck its sales and waste the advertising dollars spent promoting it… If one day you hear of a product called ‘Heck’ or ‘Gosh’, don’t be surprised. Slang is more popular than the king’s English in product naming. Again, it’s because you use it more naturally. Newest proof of this came after the phrase ‘poof – there goes perspiration’ (a TV commercial for Stopette spray deodorant) made ‘poof’ a new American slang word.

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Wanderers No More (Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

Here is a pretty middle-of-the-road type of article that explains the creation of British Palestine, the Jewish migration and the Arab unrest:

Writing in his History of Zionism, Nahum Sokalow looked in to the future: ‘The Jews have grown tired of their roll as the homeless Chosen People and would prefer to be a self-supporting small nation with a quiet spot of earth for themselves…’. The spot for which the Jews had yearned proved to be about as quiet as a live volcano.

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The Increased Suicide Rate (Literary Digest, 1933)

With the arrival of the Great Depression came an increase in American suicides. When this article appeared on the newsstands the Depression was just three and a half years old – with many more years yet to come. As the Americans saw 1932 come to a close, the records showed that 3,088 more acts of self-immolation had taken place than had been recorded the year before.


Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…

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