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.
A hard-charging investigative reporter from Sir! magazine exposed the morbid aspects of the abortion racket in this 1951 article that reported on the money-loving quack doctors who were responsible for killing 50,000 women each year in back-alley abortions; equally shocking was his report on the slaughter of half a million American babies throughout the country in 1954.
The present war has fanned the abortion racket from a flame to a blaze. Now it’s a nation-wide problem… Apparently every type of woman and girl, from every occupational group and every social level, was represented among women arrested or question in New York [on the matter of abortion].
A young wife gets swept up in the whirlwind of blind compliance that was the condition of her marriage. Her husband forces her onto the abortionist’s gurney and she awakens an hour later with profound sorrow:
I had degraded myself and betrayed my baby…
The Battle of Guadalcanal (August 7, 1942 – February 9, 1943) was the first major land offensive by Allied forces against the Japanese. When this article went to press, the American military presence on the island was exactly one month old; it was at this point that the Marines sought to outmaneuver the enemy by conducting an additional amphibious landing on the north side of the island where They found that except for a few snipers, the Japanese had scampered to the hills.
The most devilish Hell on the 2,000-mile front was the battleground before Stalingrad, in the dusty, 50-mile-wide bottleneck between the Don and the Volga. After two months’ furious fighting, the great German offensive begun on June 28 approached its climax.
A 1920s cartoon from a well-known British humor magazine depicted the doomed British adventure in Iraq as a result of an unbridled lust for oil and nothing else.
Click here to read about Punch Magazine.
Another piece about Churchill and Iraq can be read here.
Here is a segment of the letter many historians tend to agree was the one document that lead to the American involvement in the Vietnam War. Written in the Spring of 1954 when the French military was in the throes of losing the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, President Eisenhower reached out to the former British Prime Minister to express his concerns regarding the place of Vietnam within the strategic structure of the Pacific and openly wondered what a Communist Vietnam would mean in the balance of power.
If I may refer again to history; we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?…
In 1954 the French gave up on Vietnam and the U.S. accepted the challenge – click here to read about it…
Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years
More about Winston Churchill can be read here.
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.
The book review of Winston Churchill’s 1929 tome, The Aftermath:
All too frequently Mr. Churchill passes lightly over the story he alone can tell and repeats the stories that other men have told….[Yet] no one who wants to understand the world he lives in can afford to miss The Aftermath. Would that all contemporary statesmen were one-tenth as willing as Mr. Churchill to tell what they know.
More about Winston Churchill can be read here.
Read the thoughts of one W.W. I veteran who regrets having gone to war…
Shortly after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a solemn visit to the White House in order to plot the course of the war with FDR. The affect that the Prime Minister impressed upon the average American was profound and was soon made manifest in the form of innumerable gifts that began descending upon the White House addressed to him. An unsigned editorial in Collier’s Magazine noticed the event and remarked:
If we hadn’t liked Mr. Churchill immensely from the moment he arrived here, none of us would have sent him anything. The size and variety of this shower of gifts are the best measure of the terrific hit he made with all kinds and conditions of Americans.
After the British withdrawal from Gallipoli it was time for the architect of the disaster, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, to resign his office. Wishing to still play a part in the Great War, Churchill assumed the rank of Major with his old regiment, the Oxfordshire Hussars:
To have been ruler of the King’s Navy, and then to take a subordinate place in a trench in Flanders, involved a considerable change even for one whose life had been full of startling and dramatic moments.
Click here to read a review of Churchill’s remembrance of World War I .
Attached is the 1922 book review of Robert Lansing’s (1864 – 1928) book, Big Four, and Others of the Peace Conference
shows us Clemenceau dominating the conference by sheer force of mind; Wilson outmaneuvered; Lloyd George clever, alert, but not very deep; and Orlando precise and lawyer like. This book confirms the popular belief that the general scheme of the treaty was worked out by the British and French delegations without material aid from the Americans. As a consequence, the American delegation lost prestige.
Here is a very simple list of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points can be printed off of a PDF by clicking the title above.
Wilson’s Fourteen Points were ignored at Versailles and the United States withdrew it’s support for the historical conference in favor of two separate peace agreements made with Germany and Austria at a later date.
Click here to read more magazine articles about President Woodrow Wilson.
Read a 1936 article concerning Hitler’s Versailles Treaty violations.
The historian Henry Steele Commager ranked Woodrow Wilson at number 18 insofar as his impact on the American mind is concerned – click here to understand his reasoning…
A printable chart calculated in millions of U.S. dollars (evaluated prior to the 1934 value), which lays out the military spending as it increased between the years 1908 through 1913. The nations taken into account are Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States.
Numerous articles about military spending prior to W.W. II in this section…
Johannes Kroeger, ex-leader of the German-American Bund was picked up by the FBI in the Fall of 1942 for espionage. Employed as a bus driver on Long Island, New York, Kroeger would regularly carry the employees of the Republic Aviation Company to and from work. When pressed for details, the FBI remarked:
Workers in aviation plants talk too much.
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…
Filed from General MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia, here is Frank Hewlett’s (1913 – 1983) eyewitness account of the defense of American positions in the Philippines (January 7 – April 9, 1942).
