As one wise old wag once pointed out:
When robbing Peter to pay Paul, you can pretty much be guaranteed of Paul’s support come election time.
This 1935 opinion piece went into greater detail on this matter believing that this is (and has been for the past 70 years) the campaign strategy of the Democratic Party.
In a letter to his family, a soldier from one of the Scottish territorial regiments gives an account of his experiences fighting in Belgium.
He was in the thick of the fighting that came as a result of the Kaiser’s desperate attempt to take Ypres, yet he indulges in no heroics. He writes as though reporting a cricket game or a boat race.
When only a few wet months were left before all alcohol was banned from the United States, THE NATION reviewed the 1918 Anti-Prohibition Manual and the Year Book of the United States Brewers Association (1917) and came away with this brief, but amusing and informative history of drinking.
This is an opinion piece written at a time when the world stood at the doorstep of World War II. The writer went to some length to outline the fatal error made just one generation earlier and how the sins were to be paid for by their sons and daughters:
The world of today, an upheaval of antagonisms heading toward destructive war, was not inevitable. Russia need not have fallen to the Bolshevists, Germany to the Nazis, Italy to the Fascists. The United States need not have entered the Great War. Two million men slain in battle need not have died. These consequences resulted from a decision of a few men during the World War.
He argued that the Dardanelles Campaign is where the whole war went sideways.
Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.
This is a sports article that summarizes the meteoric course of the Green Bay Packers, from their earliest days in 1918, when Curly Lambeau approached a meat packing plant beseeching their patronage in order that the team could have uniforms, to the high perch they held in 1936.
Consider for a moment the success this team has had, coming as it does from the smallest city in the pro league. After battling first division teams in the National Professional Football League for many years, the Packers finally came through and won three successive world championships in 1929, 1930 and 1931… If you were to ask most college football stars which pro team they would like to play on, most of them would invariably answer, ‘The Green Bay Packers‘.
ESPIONAGE is big business in Berlin and has it’s painstaking, pecuniary bureaucracy. It is practiced by small fry (who is willing to procure for you anything from the latest deployment plan of the Red Army to a lock of Hitler’s hair) and by big-time operators who deal nonchalantly and lucratively in international secrets.
The years 1927 through 1947 has largely been remembered as a victorious era for the Chinese Nationalists in their struggle against the Communist rebels under Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976). However, following Mao’s 1947 retreat to Manchuria and the subsequent training and reforms that took place within his army, the Nationalist Chinese troops began to feel the humiliation of defeat until they made good their strategic withdrawal to Formosa (ie. Taiwan), where they have remained ever since.
This single page article goes into greater detain outlining the chronology of events.
Even as early as 1921 the world was noticing that in the U.S., that old Yankee mantra about avoiding foreign entanglements (a distortion of Washington’s Farewell Address) was being updated with a disclaimer: avoid foreign entanglements except when oil is involved.
Having put the Prussians in their place three years earlier, oil had become the new peace-time obsession for the Americans and their British ally – but it was to be the bane in their relationship: the Anglo-American irritant as Sydney Brooks remarked in FORTNIGHT REVIEW. With car manufacturers filling orders to placate a booming consumer market, the Brits pumped oil in Mesopotamia, the Americans in Texas while the oil companies from both locals vied for the rights to explore Latin America and the Caribbean.
A couple of years after the membership lists of the Ku Klux Klan had swelled to record levels, and just seven years after a chic Hollywood film director made a movie that ennobled their crimes,the Administrative Committee of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America issued a statement which served to distance the Protestant churches from that hate-filled organization.
From Amazon: Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930
Printed years before Germany’s surrender, here is the digitized copy of the English/German phrase book that was printed by the U.S. Army for distribution among those soldiers who would be occupying that country in 1945. It is beautifully illustrated by the cartoonist Milton Caniff and is sixty-seven pages in length.
British fighter pilot in the Great War, Lieutenant E.M. Roberts, gave this account of the deadly game of Boche-hunting above the clouds:
I noticed he was going down a little, evidently for the purpose of shooting me from underneath. I was not quite sure as yet that such was really his intention; but the man was quick…he put five shots into my machine. But all of them missed me.
I maneuvered into an offensive position as Quickly as I could, and I had my machine gun pelting him…The Hun began to spin earthward.
One morning a 17 year-old boy exclaimed to his amateur aviator father: Let’s fly around the island, Dad! – this article wouldn’t seem worthy of appearing on the internet if they lived on Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, but the island in question was Honolulu and the morning was December 7, 1941…
While the hunt for Nazis and hidden weapons cachés was taking place in allied-occupied Germany, a small number of U.S. Army detectives happened upon the entire archives of the Nazi Party.
Few realize that when we applaud the tremendous style that went into so much of the design of 1950s American cars, we are actually praising the fertile mind of Harley J. Earl (1893 – April 10, 1969):
Earl, who served as the Vice-President of Design at General Motors, conceived of so many design elements that are associated with that period, such as wrap-around windshields, tail-fins and two-tone paint styling. In the attached article, written when he was at the top of his game, Harley Earl tells his readers what is involved in automobile design:
Shakespeare has told us ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’. An automobile stylist must be both. He must borrow his ideas from the creatures and creations of nature which are all about him…
San Francisco played an active roll in World War Two and it was the largest port of embarkation, ferrying millions of American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines off to their unknown fates in the Pacific War. Between 1942 and 1945, the San Francisco population increased by some 150,000 – yet despite the growth, traffic along Market Street was just as heavy as it was before the war. Taxis were fewer and far more dilapidated, trolley car rides were raised to seven cents and despite a government restriction obliging all coffee vendors to charge no more than five cents for each cup, the caffeine-addicted San Franciscans paid twice that amount. U.S.O shows were plentiful throughout San Francisco and with so many of the city’s police officer’s called up, some parts of the city were patrolled by women.
True fans of San Francisco will enjoy this article.
Read about the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake…
From Amazon:
The Bad City in the Good War
This article concerns those rare women of the Nineteenth Century who defied the dictates of the patriarchy, scoffed at the feminine traditions of their mothers and donned male attire in order to bare the hardships as soldiers and sailors.
The journalist saw fit to devote greater column space to the story of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who fought with distinction for the Confederacy during the American Civil War.
Click here to read about Russian combat battalion of women that fought the Germans in the First World War.
French hatred of Germany has been looked upon as something of a bugaboo, as being greatly exaggerated, and having little reality except in the writings of the sensationalists. That this hatred is a fact, a very serious fact…
There just aren’t that many funny wills around that are devised with the intention of rendering the last word in a bad marriage or to dispense petty revenge on those who remained above-ground – that is why we found these two columns so amusing.
