In response to Stalin’s Moscow show trial convicting Leon Trotsky of anti-revolutionary sedition – a second kangaroo court was convened in Mexico in which Trotsky and his fellow travelers offered a public defense on behalf of the accused.
Attached is an eyewitness account of the Pearl Harbor attack as relayed to family members in a letter written home a few weeks after the assault:
The noise was like ten thousand factories gone nuts….Quicker than I can tell you, a bomb blows up the barracks with the gang in it, a ship explodes in front of me, a hangar goes up in flames…
The very next day President Roosevelt stood before the microphones in the well of the U.S. Capitol and asked Congress to declare war against the Empire of Japan; CLICK HERE to hear about the reactions of the American public during his broadcast…
Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941
Click here to read about the Battle of Midway.
Attached is an eyewitness account of the Pearl Harbor attack as relayed to family members in a letter written home a few weeks after the assault:
The noise was like ten thousand factories gone nuts….Quicker than I can tell you, a bomb blows up the barracks with the gang in it, a ship explodes in front of me, a hangar goes up in flames…
The very next day President Roosevelt stood before the microphones in the well of the U.S. Capitol and asked Congress to declare war against the Empire of Japan; CLICK HERE to hear about the reactions of the American public during his broadcast…
Pearl Harbor Christmas: A World at War, December 1941
Click here to read about the Battle of Midway.
In this article, the controversial author and prominent chemist, Otto Eisenschiml (1880 – 1963), recalled the events that unfolded at Ford’s Theater as Lincoln lay dying. A good deal of information is dispensed concerning the physical damage that was wrought by Boothe’s derringer (pictured) – as well as the various life-prolonging measures that were implemented by the 23 year-old doctor who was first on the scene.
When this article first appeared, the Boy Scouts of America, as an institution, was barely thirty-five years old:
The truth is that never in the history of mankind has a simple idea – an idea, incidentally, born in South Africa – so seized the imagination of boys the world over as has Scouting.
Both Boy Scots and Girl Scouts were active in the Japanese-American internment camps during W.W. II. Click here to read about that subject…
From inside Germany last week emerged the picture of a state that by all normal standards was in the last stages of dissolution… All signs indicated a physical breakdown perhaps as great as that of France in 1940… Refugees, mostly women and children with blankets around their bodies and shawls on their heads to protect them from the sub-zero weather, queue up for hours outside bakeries to get a loaf of bread. Draftees ride tanks in never-ending columns.
Countless scientists contributed to the phenomenon [of television]. Marconi gets credit, as do Farnsworth and Lee de Forest. But the real starting line was strung by an RCA scientist named Vladimir K. Zworykin in 1923, when he applied for a patent on a iconoscope…
Illustrated with 27 pictures, this article lists a number of historic and semi-historic events that were captured by the early TV cameras and seen by millions of souls who otherwise would have only had to read about them in their respective newspapers, if they cared to.
This is a lovely piece, originally written in French for a village paper, in which a journalist describes the collective excitement of the townsfolk in welcoming the Americans to their sleepy hamlet during the First World War, and how astonished they were to find that the arriving Doughboys were all of African descent!
Read an Article About American intervention in W.W. I and the Gratitude of France.
This 1915 article goes into great length listing the names of all the assorted European noblemen and plutocrats who fell during the first year and a half of the First World War.
The great world conflict which broke out soon after [the murder of Archduke Ferdinand] has placed the pall of mourning over every third home in the belligerent countries of Europe… The dreadful slaughter has fallen with especial heaviness on the upper and wealthy classes…
The writer, Charles Stolberg, also included the names of the most admired European athletes who gave their lives for king and country.
In this article, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) attempted to play (very politically) both sides of the street, implying on the one hand that the creation of the Japanese-American internment camps seemed a reasonable measure in wartime; but the reader doesn’t have to have a degree in psychology to recognize that she believed otherwise.
With the fall of imperial Japan, YANK correspondent Robert MacMillan was
one of the very first journalists to interview the Japanese Kamikaze pilot Norio Okamoto, which allowed his readers to gain some understanding as
to how the Kamikaze Corps operated:
Okomoto’s story took all the wind -the Divine Wind – out of the Kamikaze sails. Even the interpreter, a Japanese civilian, was surprised. He had worked for radio Tokyo and while he knew a lot of the propaganda stories were ridiculous, he had believed the Kamikaze legend.
To mark the momentous occasion of Benny Goodman and his Band performing for the ‘corsage clique’ on Park Avenue in 1938, ‘the King of Swing’ wrote this short essay concerning all his good work and the enjoyment that it brought to the Jitterbuggers of the world:
Swing is violent, at least so they tell me. But I’m willing to bet that Society is going to toss aside its toppers and tippers and really cut loose. They’ll all come slumming and stay for dancing.
Here is a paragraph that was pulled from an interview with President Wilson in 1916 in which the bookish president remarked upon the various interesting aspects of President Lincoln:
He was not fit to be president until he was president.
When Christian Dior died quite suddenly in 1957, the eggheads of the fashion world got their knickers in a twist as they wondered who would serve as the creative force for the great fashion house that he had established just ten years earlier; all eyes turned to his very young assistant, a 21 year old man named Yves Saint Laurent (1936 – 2008).
Click here to read a 1961 article about Jacqueline Kennedy’s influence on American fashion.
Abuses were all too common in most Southern penitentiaries up until the Fifties. This article chronicles one prison in Florida and their practice of placing the prisoners in 60-gallon barrels when they stepped out of line.
An odor rises from the men, the characteristic odor of an army. It is the smell of of wool and the bitter smell of fatigue and the smell of gun oil and leather. Troops always have this odor. The men lie sprawled, some with their mouths open, but they do not snore. Perhaps they are too tired to snore, but their breathing is an inaudible, pulsing thing.
Click here to read a movie review of The Grapes of Wrath.
Examine Lincoln’s prose and the fruitage of his reading will appear… The easy quickening of Lincoln’s mind came from books like Aesop’s Fables, Robinson Caruso and Pilgrim’s Progress… To a man who knew intimately so many creatures, both wild and domestic, the fables seemed natural.
During the pre-dawn hours of November 7, 1918 the German peace delegation crossed through to the American sector at a battle-scared Argonne village named Cunel. A former private in the U.S. Fifth Infantry Division, Amico J. Barone, recalled that night and wrote this essay in 1938.
