The Collier’s Magazine obituary for Wilbur Wright (1867 – 1912) was written by the aviator and journalist Henry Woodhouse (born Mario Terenzio Casalengo, 1884 – 1970).
The Brothers Wright gave flying instructions to a young boy who would later become one of the first U.S. Air Force generals – you can read about him here…
Click here to read about a much admired American aviator who was attracted to the fascist way of thinking…
Lincoln could use humor as an explosive weapon as well as employing it as a constructive force… For Abraham Lincoln never told a story except with a purpose. He himself pointed this out often. His anecdotes were the precision tools of a highly skilled and intelligent wit… ‘I laugh because I must not cry: That’s all, that’s all.’
Click here to read another article about Lincoln’s use of humor and story-telling.
Click here to read the back-story concerning the Star-Spangled Banner…
Reagan was the first actor to become president, Buchanan the first tailor, Jefferson the first architect and Abraham Lincoln was the first writer to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:
The world has long known that Lincoln liked an occasional back-room story. Here is the only record – in his own handwriting – of that earthy side of the Great Emancipator.
He is only thirty-eight now and he is a member of the English Ministry… he has been a wonder of the Empire since he was twenty-five. The only American he can be compared to is [Teddy] Roosevelt; and that comparison is not especially apt, because Churchill writes far better than Roosevelt does, talks far better, and at thirty-eight has gone farther than Roosevelt had when he reached that age… Churchill will undoubtedly be a prime minister of England one of these days.
H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill first met in 1901. Churchill was a deep admirer of Well’s fiction, and he eagerly pursued a friendship. The two enjoyed a spirited exchange of letters that went on for decades – although it seemed to have taken a hit in the Twenties when the two disagreed on the nascent USSR – but their friendship was not seriously shaken. In this 1940 article, Wells stepped up to tell American readers how fortunate Britons are to have such a man of discernment standing at the helm:
I will confess I have never felt so disposed to stand by a man through thick and thin as I do now in regard to him. And I think that, in writing that, I write for a very great number of my fellow countrymen who have hitherto felt frustrated and fragmentary amidst the rush of events.
During the winter of 1942, Private Harry Carpenter, U.S Army, made a big honking mistake when he decided to declare that the current war was a white man’s war. Arrested by the MPs and carted-off to stand before Magistrate Thomas O’Hara, Carpenter found that he had reaped the whirlwind: he was charged with treason against the United States.
A look at What Price Glory? and Journey’s End and the new spirit that created these dramas.
When R.C. Sheriff, nearly ten years after the Armistice, sat down to write an easy play for the amateurs of his boat club, he seems to have had no fixed notion as to what a play ought to be. The script of Journey’s End shows a complete absence of strain…
Click here to read an additional article concerning Journeys End.
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?
What do you know: the same arguments existed 100 years ago, too…
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.
