Wise words from the Victorians regarding the perils of bachelorhood:
There is no tear shed for the old bachelor; there is no ready hand and kind heart to cheer him in his loneliness and bereavement…
Click here to read other Victorian Gems.
Wise words from the Victorians regarding the perils of bachelorhood:
There is no tear shed for the old bachelor; there is no ready hand and kind heart to cheer him in his loneliness and bereavement…
Click here to read other Victorian Gems.
Mesopotamia should be placed in the same file as Gallipoli, along with all the other various assorted fantasies conceived by his Lordship. Mr. Churchill hopes to avert any fresh rising by setting up an Arab Government. The people are to elect a National Assembly this summer, and the Assembly is to choose a ruler…Mr. Churchill admits that that he does not know whether the people of [Iraq], who are rent with tribal, sectarian, racial, and economic feuds, will choose the Emir Feisul.
Click here to read about Churchill’s other folly: the Battle of Gallipoli.
Unlike the Vanity Fair magazine that we find on our newsstands, the Vanity Fair published under the steady hand of it’s first editor, Frank Crowninshield (1872 – 1947), was able to recognize that military heroes are a rare, three-dimensional breed, composed of an uncommon variety of testicular fortitude. Indeed, some years back, Israel went to the effort of giving IQ tests to the heroes of the Six Day War (1967) and they were not surprised to find that all of them tested in the higher ranges of their populations. The W.W. I U.S. Army hero Crowninshield saluted on the attached page was the commanding officer of a brave group of men called the Lost Battalion.
Click here to read more about the heroism of Major Whittelesey.
Before there was social media, there were the personal ads.
And what, as a general rule, is the personal column used for? To communicate, to sell, to plot, to advertise, to complain, to hope, to invite, to reject, to pray, to love, to hate, to express appreciation – in fact, anything.
A wife, having suffered her husband’s stench long enough, had the police drag him away to stand before the local magistrate where, she hoped, some swift, punitive measure would be delivered and placate not only herself, but the long-suffering tax-payers as well. The husband agreed to bathe.
Attached is the 1932 review of Woman: Theme and Variations by Major A. Corbett-Smith:
There is no mystery about women, he announces…she is never quite sure of herself in comparison with other women; but she is well aware of her superiority to man…
Click here to read about feminine conversations overheard in the best New York nightclubs of 1937.
Do you think your job is tough? Pity the pioneering gynecologists of the 16th Century…
Yet another examination of U.S. Navy officer insignia with additional illustrations of American naval rating patches.
The following article and illustration were clipped from the World War Two G.I. magazine, YANK; which we have included in our study of American World War One naval uniforms because we couldn’t imagine that the regulations involving the wearing of the lid could have been that much more different from the days when Admiral Simms ran the shop.
The attached article, A Mother’s Ordeal with Homosexuality first appeared in 1955, a time when the term gay was not known, and the word homosexual was used in its place – and as you will learn, homosexual was essentially synonymous with the designations sex offender, Paraphilia and Child molester.
The charge of homosexuality against someone, anyone, is not a light one. It requires proof, the strictest proof there is; getting it is not an easy matter.
This is a brief look at the up-bringing of Mark Twain (born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835 – 1910), accompanied by two 1910 magazine photographs of the people who inspired the writer to create Becky Thatcher and Huckleberry Finn. Also interviewed was the the man who instructed the author in the skills required to pilot the Mississippi River.
The historian Henry Steele Commager chose to rank Mark Twain at number 4 insofar as his impact on the American mind was concerned – click here to understand his reasoning (does this still hold true?)…
When the our neighbors to the North first dipped their toe into the tepid waters of socialism, they they chose to do so with car insurance:
A law compelling automobile operators and public schools to buy insurance from a state-owned company.
The exclusion of the word obey from the traditional wedding vow has been happening for a good while, and it seems to have pre-dated the 1960s; however in the following case, the presiding official at one wedding would only do so for a fee.
The attached article from LITERARY DIGEST will give you a clear understanding of all that Britain went through in order to govern Iraq in the early Twenties; Britain’s treaties with the Turkish and Angoran Governments in regards to the oil-rich region of Mosul, the selection of an Arab King and the suppression of various Iraqi revolts.
The Mesopotamian Adventure required a tremendous amount of treasure and yielded very little excitement for either party:
At the end of the war we found Iraq upon our hands, and our Government agreed to accept a mandate for the administration for this inhospitable territory.
Click here to see a Punch Magazine cartoon about the British adventure in Iraq.
Attached is a chart pulled from a 1936 issue of THE LITERARY DIGEST that reported on the U.S. urban homicide rate spanning the years 1926 through 1935. It indicates that the murder rate began climbing during the economic depression (from 8.8 in 1928); the years 1934 through 1936 saw a steady decline in urban homicide, more than likely as a result of the end of Prohibition.
Often decanted in barber shops is the old joke:
There is only one thing that stops hair from falling——the floor.
Our hats are off to the scientific-community of 1914 that tried to make the above gag even more forgettable than it already was, however, the search for the cure for baldness continues into the Twenty-First Century.
