Recent Articles

The Paris Winter Collection
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

After years of material shortage, the accent is definitely on the feminine, with all of its flounces… A look at all the collections shows that black is the outstanding color for afternoon and dinner. Drapings, wrappings and swathings that girdle the hips are the outstanding line. The favored fabrics are velvet , velveteen, corduroy (used horizontally, as are other striped materials) monotone tweeds, Kashas (a twill-weave fabric of wool mixed with Cashmere), and some Scotch plaids.

The Boeing Collaboration
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

A 1939 article that concerned the rapid growth of the German Air Force, but also referred to the scandalous business dealings of American manufacturers Boeing and Douglas Aircraft had in this expansion.

It has taken Field Marshall Hermann Wilhelm Goering a little over six years to build the German Air Armada, one of the world’s most formidable offensive forces, out of a magnificent bluff.


A similar article can be read here…

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The Navy Mourned
(Newsweek, 1945)

It was no secret around Washington that President Franklin Roosevelt was partial to the U.S. Navy. The admirals and other senior officers of the navy certainly knew – and loved it. The attached essay was an appreciative salute to FDR composed shortly after his death by Admiral William Pratt (1869 – 1957):

Other men, military in training and veterans of successful land campaigns, have sat in the White House, but never before in the history of our country has any man ever sat there whose instincts at heart were essentially those of a sailor.

Things Were Not Right in Korea
(’48 Magazine, 1948)

Written two years prior to the Korean War, this article is about the joint occupation of Korea – the Soviets in the industrialized North, the Americans in the agrarian South, and how poorly both regions were being served before the 1950 war:

The issue in Korea is not Communism vs. Americanism, but occupation-trusteeship vs. freedom. On that issue, both Russia and the United States would lose after a free vote of the people, because the two powers have, each in their own way, failed Korea.


The Soviet Army moved into northern Korea during the August of 1945, click here to read about it…

Unsuspected Qualities of Indian Music
(Literary Digest, 1908)

A short article on the topic Native American music and the studies of Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838 – 1923), who had overseen a number of Native American archival recording sessions around the time this article appeared in print. Fletcher once wrote:

We find more or less of it in Beethoven and Schubert, still more in Schumann and Chopin, most of all in Wagner and Liszt.

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A GI View of Japan
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

Reporter Robert Shaplen (1917 – 1988) filed this account of how the GIs have reacted to the strangest country they have ever encountered:

Looking at the Japanese, the average GI wonders how they ever managed to prosecute a war in the first place. Everything in Japan, even broken and blasted cities and factories, has a miniature toy-like appearance. Automobiles, the ones that are left, don’t work; trains bear little resemblance to the Twentieth Century Limited or a fast freight back home. The short, slight people are dressed poorly and drably.

First Blood
(American Legion Weekly, 1922)

A veteran of the U.S. First Division, Sixteenth Infantry, tells the chilling story of that rainy night in November, 1917, when the first German raid upon the American trenches took place:

It was on that night that Company F took over its first front line position, received its baptism of fire, bore the brunt of the first German raid and lost the first American troops killed and captured in the World War.

…two hundred and forty Bavarians, the widely advertised cut-throats of the German Army, hopped down on us. The first raid on American troops was in full swing. They had crawled up to our wire under cover of their artillery barrage and the moment it lifted were right on top of us.


The U.S. Army would not launch their own trench raid for another four months.

Whither Latin?
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1952)

This article charts the decline of Latin as an academic study in American schools. The disappearance of Latin began in the Thirties and steadily snowballed to such a point that by 1952 its absence was finally noticed.

Is Latin on its way out in high schools? The answer is a confident ‘NO.’
It’s hard to see how it can go any lower,’ declares Dr. John F. Latimer, head of Latin studies
at George Washington University.

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What’s in that Brooklyn Water?
(Quick Magazine, 1952)

2013 marked the 100th year since the first film was made in Hollywood, and in that time one American neighborhood more than any other has consistently supplied the film and television industry with a seemingly inexhaustible pool of talent: Brooklyn, New York. From Clara Bow in the era of silent film to Gabby Sidibe in the digital – the talented sons and daughters of Brooklyn have made their way West and we have all been the beneficiaries.

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The Ill Fated One
(Creative Art Magazine, 1932)

There is much that can be said about those unfortunate men whom life does not treat properly and to whom only death gives the glory they had so wanted to know…One finds them on thrones, in society, among artists, among bourgeoisie, and in the lower classes. Modigliani has his place on this list of grief. His name follows hard upon those tragic ones, Van Gogh and Gauguin.

A convergence of unhappy circumstances compelled Modigliani to live poorly and to die miserably.

Grant Wood: Iowa as Muse
(Art Digest, 1936)

An art review of the American painter, Grant Wood (1891 – 1942), and his efforts to illustrate a 1935 children’s book titled Farm on the Hillstyle=border:none.

Wood, a reigning member of the Regionalism School in American art, had come into the public eye some six years earlier with the creation of his painting, American Gothic, is quoted in this article concerning his creative process and the importance his vision of Iowa plays while painting:

…Mr Wood seceded from the neo-meditationists of Paris because when he began to meditate he realized that ‘all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow.’

Click here to read a 1942 article by Rockwell Kent on the proper roll of American artists during wartime.

The Holocaust Rescuers
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1943)

Here is a small article that appeared during the middle of the war saying that there were German parishioners within both Protestant and Catholic churches who offered food and shelter to the various assorted minorities (primarily Jews) who were persecuted by the Nazis.

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Reds in the Government
(Weekly News Review, 1953)

This article makes a passing reference to a Soviet defector who jumped ship in 1937 in order to escape Stalin’s seemingly random purges, his name was General Alexander Barmine (1899 – 1987). In his READER’S DIGEST piece from October, 1944 (the article can be read here) Barmine declared that Soviet spies were rapidly filling up positions within the U.S. Government. His more alarming proclamation was when he wrote that FDR’s administration was protecting them – this implied that Red agents were already perched in the highest positions. When W.W. II ended (along with the Soviet alliance) both political parties in Washington agreed to weed out these moles – but they couldn’t agree as to how deep the infiltration was. The Democrats believed that by 1953 most of the Communists had been found, the Republicans felt otherwise.

Irving Berlin
(Stage Magazine, 1938)

Here is an article that discusses the surprising relevance that the music of Irving Berlin (1888 – 1989) was playing in the American music world of the 1930s.


Click here to read about Irving Berlin’s theatrical production during W.W. I…

A Profile of Cartoonist Rube Goldberg, Cartoonist and Quack-Inventor
(Vanity Fair, 1914)

In the attached 1914 magazine profile, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin (1851 – 1935) asked, Who is Goldberg? and then jumped right in and proceeded to answer that question. However, the reader should understand that in 1914 it simply did not take very long to give the answer. With so much good work yet to come, this article outlined the cartoonist’s earliest employment record while making clear that he was already well known for his invention gags, which had already appeared in many papers across the United States.


If you would like to read a 1930 article written by Rube Goldberg click here.

Click here to see an anti-New Deal cartoon that Goldberg drew in 1939.

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