Recent Articles

Seeing the ”Wonder Machine” for the First Time… (Delineator Magazine, 1937)

This is one of the most enjoyable early television articles: an eye-witness account of one the first T.V. broadcasts from the R.C.A. Building in New York City during the November of 1936. The viewing was set up strictly for members of the American press corps and the excitement of this one journalist clearly could not be contained:

In the semi-darkness we sat in tense silence waiting to see the premiere demonstration of television… Television! What would it be like?

Seeing the ”Wonder Machine” for the First Time… (Delineator Magazine, 1937) Read More »

The War Begins (NY Times, 1861)

The ball has opened. War is inaugurated. The batteries of Sullivan’s Island, Morris Island and other points were opened on Fort Sumpter at 4 ‘oclock this morning… The answer to General Beauregard’s demand by Major Anderson was that he would surrender when his supplies were exhausted, that is, if he was not reinforced.


Here are the dispatches from Charleston that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on April 13, 1861.

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The Emergence of a New World Power (The New Republic, 1922)

Having studied the global power structure that came into place following the carnage of the First World War, British philosopher Bertrand Russel (1872 – 1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) was surprised to find that the most dominate nation left standing was not one of the European polities that had fought the war from start to finish – but rather the United States: a nation that had participated in only the last nineteen months of the war.

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How One Southerner Overcame His Racist Attitudes (Coronet Magazine, 1948)

The attached is an historic article that explains the lesson that so many white Americans had to learn in order that America become one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. There can be no doubt that many ragged, dog-eared copies of this middle class magazine must have been passed from seat to seat in the backs of many buses; perhaps one of the readers was a nineteen year-old divinity student named Martin Luther King, Jr.?


Before the Atom Bomb came along, Joseph Stalin hatched a scheme to invade the U.S. and create two Americas, one black, one white – click here to read more…

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The Rise of Oral Roberts (Coronet Magazine, 1955)

The editors at Coronet recognized that Oral Roberts was not your average minister, who was simply contented to preside over thirty full pews every week; they labeled him a businessman-preacher and subtly pointed out that the man’s detractors were many and his flashy attire unseemly for a member of clergy:


God doesn’t run a breadline…I make no apology for buying the best we can afford. The old idea that religious people should be poor is nonsense.

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‘A Negro Poet” (NY Times, 1897)

Here is the NY Times review of Lyrics of Lowly Life (1897) by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906), who was a distinguished African-American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If Helen had the face that launched a thousand ships, then Dunbar had the poetry to launch at least twenty thousand schools – for it seems that is about how many there are named for him.

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‘What the Finns Won” (Collier’s Magazine, 1940)

We suppose debate will go on for years about whether the Finns or the Russians won their 105-day war of late 1939 and early 1940. We think the Finns won all the phases of the war except those included in the peace treaty – and that the treaty was a minor matter in the long view of it all…As for the predictions that the Russians will be coming back in six months or so to gobble up the rest of Finland – we may easily be wrong, but we can’t picture the Russians tackling the Finns again for another thirty years.

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