A review of Harold Nicolson’s 1921 biography, Paul Verlaine. Numerous aspects of Verlaine’s life and poetry are discussed as are the roots of French Symbolism.
An appreciative essay celebrating the work of Guillaume Apollinaire (born Wilhelm Apollinaris de Kostrowitzky: 1880 – 1918) by the high-brow art critic Paul Rosenfed (1890 – 1946).
For Apollinaire possessed the perfect adjustibility of the born poet. He would have found himself much at home in any environment into which he would have been born, whether it would have been one of pampas and herds and lonely hamlets, or one of concrete, newspapers, war and steel.
An American artillery officer from that famous division recalled the last minute of the war to end all wars…
Not too long after the end of World War II, the French, British and Americans found that they had to assemble a coalition of nations (NATO) that would be willing to fight the Soviets for what was believed to be an even bigger rumble in the future – but after losing two enormous wars, West Germany refused to join.
A first-hand account as to the daily goings-on at Hitler’s Plotzensee Prison.
Written by Jan Valtin (alias of Richard Julius Hermann Krebs: 1905 – 1951), one of the few inmates to make his way out of that highly inclusive address and tell the tale. Krebs was a communist in the German resistance movement who later escaped to New York and wrote a book (Out of the Night
) about his experiences in Nazi Germany.
The prisoner who has served his sentence is usually not released; he is surrendered to the Gestapo for an indefinite term in one of the concentration camps, preferably Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald. Incurable hard cases are sent to Dachau…
Assorted quotes addressing some aspects of the 1930 Hollywood and the entertainment industry seated there. Some are prophets who rant-on about the impending failure of talking pictures, others go on about the obscene sums of money generated in the film colony; a few of the wits are well-known to us, like Thomas Edison, George M. Cohan and Walter Winchell but most are unknown – one anonymous sage, remarking about the invention of sound movies, prophesied:
In ten years, most of the good music of the world will be written for sound motion pictures.
Attached are a few words on the W.W. I naval recruiting poster To Arms by illustrator Milton Bancroft.
The article primarily describes what the duties of a ship’s bugler are, what this position represents and why this was such an suitable graphic image for recruiting sailors for the war.
A collection of twelve fashion illustrations depicting the variety of sleeve treatments available during the winter of 1921. Some of the details offered were created by the House of Worth, Captain Molyneux, Martial et Armand and Madeleine and Madeleine.
This is one of the first profiles of Hollywood beauty and former child star Natalie Wood (1938 – 1981).
The journalist went into some details explaining how she was discovered at the age of five by the director Irving Pichel (1891 – 1954) and how it all steadily snowballed into eighteen years of semi-steady work that provided her with a invaluable Hollywood education (and subsequently creating a thoroughly out-of-control teenager).
At sixteen, Natalie co-starred with the late James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and the resulting Dean hysteria swept her forward with him… She cannot bear to be alone. She is full of reasonless fears. Of airplanes. Of snakes. Of swimming in the ocean.
On the matter of the American fashion designer Adele Simpson (1904 – 1995), it must be remembered that she was a prominent player in American fashion for many decades; a woman who had been awarded both a Coty Award (1949) as well as a Neiman Marcus Award (1946). Her creations were highly sought after by the crowned heads of both Europe and Hollywood.
Click here to read about wartime fabric rationing in the 1940s.
As a wise, old sage once remarked: You don’t go to war with the army that you want, you go to war with the army that you have -no truer words were ever spoken; which brings us to this news piece from a popular American magazine published in 1910. The reader will be interested to know that just seven years prior to the American entry into World War One, the U.S. Army was lousy with deserters and it was a problem they were ill equipped to handle.
Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.
This article refers to a temperate review of Anglo-German relations as understood by Dr. Theodore Schiemann (1847 – 1921), confidant of Kaiser Wilhelm II and professor at the University of Berlin. Interestingly, the professor predicted some aspects of the forth-coming war correctly but, by enlarge, he believed Germany would be victorious:
A German-English war would be a calamity for the whole world, England included; for it may be regarded as a foregone conclusion that simultaneously with such an event every element in Asia and Africa that is hostile to the English would rise up as unbidden allies of Germany.
The YANK MAGAZINE editors remarked that this brief column, which was intended to help American G.I.s deal with panic attacks during combat, was written by the National Research Council and appeared in the Infantry Journal of 1943. It is a segment from a longer article titled, Psychology for the Fighting Man. The psychologists who wrote it presented a number of examples of soldier’s panic (mostly from the last war) and illustrate how best the front-line soldier could deal with this stress while the bullets are flying. Happily, they made it sound so easy.
Click here to read about one other effect the stress of combat wrought upon the luckless men of the Forties.
From Amazon: Psychology for the Fighting Man
– also from Amazon: Cowardice: A Brief History
Although our friends in Asia, Europe and Canada had been fighting the Axis for at least a year and a half, American corporations continued to trade with the fascists all the way up until the U.S. declaration of war. This 1941 article, published seven months prior to that day, goes into some detail on the matter; although corporations are not named, it is pretty easy to identify them by their products.
One reason why America today is short of ships to fill Britain’s desperate needs is [due to] the fact that for six years or more, Japan and her scrap agents bought almost every American cargo vessel placed on the auction blocks, using them for scrap to feed the blazing steel mills of Nipon.
Shortly after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, William H. Herndon (1816 – 1891), Lincoln’s law partner, devoted much of his life to collecting as much original source material on the man as he could possibly find. Indeed, scholars have pointed out that there never would have been an accurate word written about Lincoln if not for the efforts of Herndon. The following description of Lincoln is from a lecture delivered by Herndon in 1865.
Knowing, as they did, that the Broadway composer Oscar Hammerstein II (1895 – 1960) was no slouch when it came to writing hummable tunes with snappy lyrics, hundreds of people would write to him daily seeking advice as to how they might be able to do the same (indeed, the search logs at Google indicate that this question is asked 369,000 times each month). No doubt fed-up with these never ending solicitations – Hammerstein penned this article, What Makes Songs Popular: in four pages he spewed-forth all that he knew about writing music and lyrics:
It seems to me that the most important element in a lyric is subject matter. A song had better be about something fundamental – which is why so many songs are about love.
must have been fed up with answering the hundreds of letters that he received daily begging him for tips as to how best to write songs and lyrics – he turned to the editors of ’48 MAGAZINE who were happy to print his article in which answered those questions
Attached are the rantings of one Frenchman on the matter of American gullibility, solipsism and naive stupidity. While recognizing an innate sense of optimism that seemed natural to Americans, the Gaul also believed that within the American culture the seed of tyranny had been planted and would one day bloom.
And in this new and vigorous country they are going to make nationalism a great religion, the supreme intellectual and social motive. This means Prussianizing, pure and simple.
Whether for good or for ill, the American people have left their thumb print on much of the French language – the liberal sprinkling of the adjective Americain was ever present in 1927, as it is today. This article seeks to explain the meanings and origins of such French expressions as Oncle D’Amerique or Homard a l’Americaine -among other assorted phrases inspired by the free and the brave.
