Les Américains Sont Là!
Those were the words on everybody’s lips as the first big detachments of United States troops began to appear in the Paris streets… I think there is a simple politeness in these young warriors from across the sea, whether they come from some of the big cities, New York, Boston, Chicago or from some far-away states on the other side of the Rockies.
A brief art review from 1946 announcing an exhibition of paintings, drawings, photographs, architectural plans and models by the modern architect Le Corbusier (né Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887 – 1965) at the Mezzanine Gallery in Rockefeller Center.
Along with Ozenfant, Le Corbusier invented Purism. The earliest painting in the collection, and the only one of that period (1920), which is familiar to art audiences as part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
When President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights submitted their findings to the White House in December of 1947, the anxious and skeptical editors at COMMONWEAL MAGAZINE eagerly waited their conclusions. Knowing that this Southern president was the only Klansman (1924 membership) to have ever attained such high office, they were doubtful that any good would come of it, and in this column they explain why they felt that way.
Four years later an article was written about the gratitude many African-Americans felt toward President Truman and his stand on civil rights – read it here…
James Baldwin remembered other Harlem riots he had witnessed… KEY WORDS: 1964 Harlem Race Riot newspaper article,1964 Harlem Race Riot
A profile of Dr. George Washington Carver (1864 – 1943):
One of the greatest agricultural chemists of our day was born a slave 80 years ago. He has given the world approximately 300 new by-products from the peanut…Today Dr. Carver is the South’s most distinguished scientist. He turned the peanut into a $60,000,000 industry.
I simply go to my laboratory, shut myself in and ask my Creator why He made the peanut. My Creator tells me to pull the peanut apart and examine the constituents. When this is done, I tell Him what I want to create, and He tells me I can make anything that contains the same constituents as a peanut. I go to work and keep working until I get what I want.
This is a light history of the African-American people; weak in some spots, informative in others, it’s greatest value lies in telling the story of Blacks in the Thirties.
Because the colored race comprises almost a 10th of the population of the United States, sociologists sometimes refer to the Negro as ‘the Tenth Man.’ As such, he is little known to the other nine. Yet there are 12,500,000 colored persons in the nation – black, brown and some so white that 10,000 pass over the color line every year to take up life as whites.
The first three paragraphs of this article explain the 19th Century origins of a moniker that represents the most hideous institution born on American shores. The term in question is Jim Crow – a sobriquet that came into use decades before the American Civil War but was refashioned into a synonym that meant institutional racism. The article goes on to recall one African-American Congressman and his fruitless efforts to clean up Jim Crow.
Not since the Civil War has the nation faced such an explosive situation as it will when public schools in the South open their doors next month. In a plea for tolerance, sympathy and understanding in the South as well as the North, Pulitzer Prize award winning journalist Virginius Dabney (1901 – 1995) analyzes and interprets a problem serious to Americans in every section of the country.
Here is a brief glance at various observations made by a correspondent for The London Observer who compared the two dominate tribes found in 1933 Moscow and Berlin. The journalist was far more distracted by the similarities in their street hustle and their speechifying rather than their shared visions in governance and culture – for example, both the Nazis and Soviets were attracted to restrictions involving public and private assembly, speech and gun ownership while sharing an equal enthusiasm for May Day parades and the color red. Additionally, both totalitarian governments held religion as suspect and enjoyed persecuting their respective dupes – for the Nazis that was the Jews and for the Communists it was the bourgeoisie.
Read an article explaining how the Soviets used early radio…
The Army Nurse during World War II was at work in every quarter of the globe, serving on land, on the sea in hospital ships and in the air, evacuating the wounded by plane. Because of the rugged conditions under which she served, she was trained to use foxholes and to understand gas defense, to purify water in the field and to crawl , heavily equipped, under barbed wire.
By the time VJ-Day rolled around, the Army Nurse Corps was 55,000 strong.
(From Amazon: G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II
Howl is written, says Ginsberg, peering as he does through his glasses with a friendly intermingling of smile and solemnity, in some of the rhythm of Hebraic liturgy – chants as they were set down by the Old Testament prophets. That’s what it’s supposed to represent – prophets howling in the Wilderness. That, in fact, is what the whole Beat Generation is, if it’s anything, – howling in the Wilderness against a crazy civilization.
There is only one retail establishment in the world that is able to boast that they had retained the patronage of both Thomas Jefferson and Andy Warhol, and that would be Brooks Brothers.
Diplomats and prize fighters, dukes and bankers, Cabinet members and theatrical luminaries stroll every day through the ten-story building on Madison Avenue. The sight of Secretary of State Dean Acheson trying on a new overcoat, or Clark Gable testing a new pair of shoes, or the Duke of Windsor undecided between a red or green dressing gown causes scarcely a flurry. The reason is simply that the store itself is a national legend, as noted in its own right as any of its patrons.
The attached five page article lays out the first 132 years of Brooks Brothers. It is printable.
– from Amazon:
Brooks Brothers: Generations of Style, It’s About the Clothing
An illustrated five page article that will key you in on all the actresses, nieces, Mifords and assorted divas courted by handsome Adolf throughout the Twenties and Thirties. It was said that the dictators co-tyrants wished deeply that he would marry if only to end his moods of melancholy, storms of anger, alternate depression and driving energy, hoping it will make Hitler more human.
Click here to read about the magic Hitler had with German women…
Here is the PM movie review of At The Front North Africa directed by John Ford and produced by Darryl Zanuck for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. The reviewer seemed irked that the film only showed the Germans having a difficult time.
Click here to read about the American Army in North Africa…
Sporting terms used as a metaphors for war are very common and come naturally to those who tend to think about matters military on a regular basis; yet this article uses the expression, playing the game more as a character trait that was unique to the British. The author, Austin Harrison, writing in 1915 (the year of grim determination) believed that the English have always played the game as a matter of course; they have always maintained good form, and yet:
Playing the game is only half the battle in war [and]…it will be the finest game we ever have played.
In 1948 the American history professor Henry Steele Commager (1902 – 1998) read this article that named the most powerful men in Cold War Washington – he then began to compose a list of his own, a list that he felt was far more permanent in nature. Commager wrote the names of the most influential thinkers of the past 100 years, leaders and writers who he credited for having supplied us with our symbols, our values, our ideas and ideals.
Our movies are becoming more blatantly obsessed with sex. Ten years ago it was unthinkable for a Hollywood picture to show a couple in bed together – even a husband and wife, since this violated an unwritten taboo of the industry’s self-regulating Productions Code. Today it is not surprising to see two people embracing, in varying stages of dishabille… As motion picture critic of The New York Times and as one who has watched American movies from the ‘silent’ days, I can truthfully say I have never seen them so unnecessarily loaded with stuff that is plainly meant to shock.
Click here to read more about the destruction of taboos in American pop-culture…
That was the way D-Day began, the second front the Allies had waited for for two years. It came like a shadow in the English midnight… The Nazi news agency, DNB, flashed the first story at 12:40 a.m. on June 6, Eastern wartime. Before dawn, British and American battleships were pounding shells into Havre, Caen and Cherbourg, high-booted skymen of the [88th] and 101st U.S.A. paratroop divisions had dropped into the limestone ridges of the Seine valley and landing barges filled with American, Canadian and British infantrymen nosed up to the beaches along the estuaries of the Orne and Seine rivers.
