Articles from The Literary Digest
Attached is a 1913 article from an American magazine in which the journalist reported on a strong sense of insecurity experienced by France as a result of Imperial German military hubris. The reporter illustrated the point with various quotes from French papers of the day and in a similar vein, sites a number of German papers that express an arrogant contempt for France.
This 1937 fashion report let it be known that men’s fashions were getting more colorful; items that we associate with the Fifties such as plaid cummerbunds made their appearance first in 1937. The first clothing item to cross the color line was, in all probability, the Hawaiian shirt – which came into vogue some five years earlier.
Click here to read a related article from 1919.
This article originally appeared in a French magazine and it lists numerous cultures, both ancient and modern, that eat dogs regularly:
We do not know the edible dog or the edible cat, in France, and probably since the siege they have been little served (openly at least) on the tables of Paris restaurants. At Peking, and throughout China, there is no dainty repast without its filet or leg of dog; the cat is rather a dish of the poorer classes.
Jews do not seek vengeance, despite the opinions commonly held in certain quarters that the god of of the Jews is a a God of vengeance. We repudiated
this concept of God and religion and religion since the days of when Joshua established the cities of refuge and have entirely outgrown it since the days of the Bible prophets… Wes stand with the majority proponents of the ennobling suggestion, and trust that the counsel of forgiveness, mercy and loving-kindness will prevail.
In 1921 a Kyoto Bible school was challenged by a neighboring Buddhist temple. The confrontation did not involve the finer points of theology (not openly, anyway) but which of the two tribes was superior at baseball. It was a Hell of a game.
The uncredited foreign correspondent made it known within the opening paragraphs that the Kyoto Buddhists were irked by the spread of Christianity in that region of Japan and chose to deploy any means at their disposal to gain some sort of advantage.
Twenty-one years later a Japanese team would play an American team. Read about that game here…
A collection of low opinions concerning the Flapper and her confederates, gathered from numerous clerical magazines throughout the fruited plane:
There is a great deal of frank talk among them that in many cases smacks of boldness. One hears it said that the girls are actually tempting the boys more than the boys do the girls, by their dress and conversation…
Scorned for too long by churchmen as an ambulatory example of folly, the flapper at length finds herself defended by the Church. She is not, in this new view, the brainless, overdressed Jezebel that she has been pictured to be. ‘She is a symbol of the times. As she sweeps down the street, she is like nothing so much as a fine, young spirited puppy-dog, eager for the fray’.
Unlike some members of clergy, the wise sages of Hollywood were clearly numbered among those who held favorable views about flappers, but they didn’t always produce films that were sympathetic to their causes; for example, the editors of Flapper magazine hated this movie.
American columnist Walter Lippmann of the The New York Herald Tribune wrote:
They symbolize the moral and intellectual character of the Nazi regime. For these bonfires are not the work of schoolboys or mobs but of the present German Government acting through its Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
CLICK HERE to read an article from 1923 about the abitious Adolf Hitler.
This article is about the diplomatic relationship that was maintained between the United States and Imperial Japan during the earliest months of the FDR administration.
Click here to read about the Japanese rejection of the Washington Naval Treaty in 1935.
Speaking of Evil Geniuses, let’s not forget all that the German chemists did to dream-up efficient substitutes for motor fuel, rubber, coal and various metals just before Hitler launched the war in Europe.
The most significant little word in the German vocabulary of 1937 is Ersatz. In two syllables, which, literally translated, means ‘substitute’, it summarizes the bold experiment in rigged economy which is Adolf Hitler’s Four Year Plan… The Reich’s great chemical industry went into high gear immediately, and at this point Ersatz became the big little word of the German language.
