Articles from Harper’s Weekly
“The attempt to enforce the draft in the city of New York has led to rioting. Men have been killed and houses burned; worst of all, an orphan asylum – a noble monument of charity for the reception of colored orphans – has been ruthlessly destroyed, and children and nurses have lost everything they had in the world.”
“…It is said that the panic grew out of the fears aroused by the ferment in the Southern States. Although at New Orleans all is quiet, and everybody seeks peace, throughout the states of Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia, great excitement prevails; and if any reliance can be placed upon the assertions of the politicians and the newspapers of those states, the election of Lincoln will not be tolerated without a struggle. What that form of struggle may take remains to be seen.”
William B. Wilson (1862 – 1834) was the first to be appointed Secretary of Labor, and in this article he weighs the needs of Europe for fighting men and the needs of the United States for laborers. It is a very dry article and difficult to get through, but, happily, the most interesting factoids can be found in the opening paragraphs when he explains how many new immigrants chose to leave the United States in order to fight for their old countries in Europe.
“[To the liberated slaves] the name Abraham Lincoln meant freedom, justice, home, family, happiness. In his life they knew that they lived. In his perfect benignity and just purpose, inflexible as the laws of seed-time and harvest, they trusted with all their souls, whoever doubted. Their deliverer, their emancipator, their friend, their father, he was known to them as the impersonation of that liberty for which they had wept and watched, hoping against hope, praying in the very extremity of despair and waiting with patience so sublime that fat prosperity beguiled us into the meaness of saying that their long endurance of oppression proved that God had created them to be oppressed.”
General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820 – 1891), U.S. Army, found himself in hot water at war’s end when he accepted the surrender of Confederate General Joseph Johnston (1807 – 1891) after having provided far more lenient terms than President Lincoln preferred.
Here is a tongue-and-cheek piece of creative writing in which a New York-based scribe writes as if he is reporting on the Southern press and the joyous glee that was widely generated as a result of General Lee and his magnificent victory at Gettysburg…
Here is a tongue-and-cheek piece of creative writing in which a New York-based scribe writes as if he is reporting on the Southern press and the joyous glee that was widely generated as a result of General Lee and his magnificent victory at Gettysburg…
Here is an eyewitness report of the Union rout from the first battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (July 21, 1861):
“Leaving my carriage, I went to a high point of ground and saw, by the dense cloud of dust that rose over each of the three roads by which the three columns of the [Federal] Army had advanced, that they were all on the retreat. Sharp discharges of canon in their rear indicated that they were being pursued.”
This 1907 article refers to a report made by journalist and suffragist Ida Husted Harper (1851 – 1931), concerning the status of the suffrage movement as it could be found throughout the Western world. A number of interesting issues and seldom remembered concerns are sited throughout this article on the matter of the bullying and boorish ways of those wishing to hamper the advancement of women’s suffrage.
Attached is one American journalist’s view of the Great War as it is waged on the home-front by the British people. He was impressed with the resolve of the population to win the war and he found that everyone, regardless of age or infirmity, was pursuing war work with a surprising earnestness.
The outward evidences of a nation at war are plentiful in London. Soldiers are everywhere. Columns of armed men and columns of recruits still in civilian clothes march through the streets. Drilling goes on in the parks and other places all day and every day.
Read about how the First World War effected life on the campus of Eton College.
The Titanic catastrophe was not seen by many to be a poetic topic, however there were a few wordsmiths who did address the subject. The link above will lead you to two of these poems; one by Charles Hanson Towne (1877 – 1949), a poet, essayist and playwright who, at the time of the sinking, was serving as an editor at Designer magazine. The second poem was penned by M.C. Lehr, of whom there is no surviving information.
The cheap yellow and brown men have driven out the Whites and Indians from the salmon fisheries and canneries, the farms and the mines.
– So reported the the Harper’s Weekly correspondent in the attached article that documented the 1907 anti-Asian race riots in Vancouver, British Columbia. Having visited San Francisco some time earlier, the journalist mused that similar mob-violence will result in the American West if the Federal Government does not take steps to soothe the racial tensions in some manner.
A Harper’s Weekly correspondent filed the attached report that served as an eye-witness account of the 1907 anti-Asian riots that flared up in the Canadian city of Vancouver, British Columbia. The riot triggered countless acts of violence and arson targeting the Asian communities of that western city. The widespread Asian migration to the Dominion of Canada was a result of the diplomatic agreements between Japan and Great Britain (Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902–1922) resulting in a tremendous amount of racist tension among Canadian Whites.
Today, the surname Li is the most common last name in Canada.
Click here to read about the Japanese-American internment camps of W.W. II.
Attached is a two column article pertaining to neutral states and the international laws of war as agreed upon at the Hague Convention of 1899.
This piece appeared three months prior to the infamous submarine attack on the ship and alludes to a little known matter involving Lusitania and the masquerade of flying the flags of non-combatant nations while crossing the Atlantic.
The ruse by which the Lusitania escaped the possible danger of submarines, the use of the American flag, has been resorted to over and over again in modern naval wars.
A thoughtful look at all that stage productions have had to learn while competing for audiences with the early (and exciting) Hollywood film industry:
There is no doubt that the moving picture was responsible for the disappearance of the second-class theatre devoted to traveling companies, giving lurid melodramas and plays of obvious sentiment [but] instead of taking a lesson from the history of this form of amusement, which it helped to kill, the moving picture theatre imitated one of it’s very worst features.
A two column item on anti-Semitism
In the calamity of war we act now as if we were one heart and one soul with the Jews. However, and I am pained to say it, I must declare that the Jewish question remains and will perhaps, just because of the war, become still more acute. The Jews are a foreign people and are our opponents in France, Russia and England, together with the enormous means at their disposal.
Click here to read an article about the Warsaw Ghetto.
A short, uncredited article written in response to a report by Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) concerning a series of lynchings in 1914. There is a minute breakdown, by state, showing where each of the murders took place.
An informative article from World War I concerning the doctors of all the combatant nations and how they dealt with the filthy conditions of stagnant warfare and all the different sorts of wounds that were created as a result of this very different war:
This is a dirty war. Gaseous, gangrene, lockjaw, blood poisoning, all dirt diseases… Colonel G.H. Makins of the Royal Army Medical Corps longs for the clean dust of the Veldt, which the British soldier cursed in the Boer War.
