Recent Articles – Page 123 – Old Magazine Articles

The American Springfield ’03 Rifle (U.S. Infantry Drill Manual, 1911)

A black and white diagram depicting the breach of the 1903 Springfield rifle, with all parts named. This rifle was the primary weapon for American troops during World War One and was in use by that army up until 1936. At the time of America’s entry into the W.W. I, in April of 1917, there were roughly 843,239 Springfield ’03 rifles issued; seeing that this was not nearly enough for such an adventure, the Springfield Armory manufactured 265,620 additional rifles. In some photographs from the war, American soldiers and Marines are pictured shouldering the British Enfield rifle, which had been modified to fit the ammunition of the Springfield ’03. Subsequent modifications produced the Springfield 1903A3 and A4 which were issued to American snipers up until the earlier years of the Vietnam War.

Throughout the course of the war the U.S. Army was paying $19.50 for each rifle.

The War and the Royal Families (Vanity Fair, 1915)

A five paragraph account regarding the royal families of Europe; how close they were prior to the war and the important roll played by Queen Victoria in maintaining the strong bond between them. One particular line of note:

Queen Victoria was the only human being whom the Kaiser feared.

Click here to read another article about the war and the royal families.

A Post-War Study of British Conscientious Objectors (The Spectator, 1922)

Conscription and Conscience by John W. Graham is very briefly reviewed here; the summation provides some fast facts on the history of British conscientious objectors during World War One, yet tactfully fails to mention that during the course of the war, the British Army ordered 306 conscientious objectors be shot at dawn. In 2006 the British government pardoned them; just in time.

Henri Landru, Monsieur Verdux and Charlie Chaplin (Rob Wagner’s Script, 1947)

Attached is an article about the Charlie Chaplin film, Monsieur Verdux (1947) and the monstrous beast Henri Landru -the French murderer on whom the story is loosely based. This article was written by Gordon Kahn, remembered chiefly in our own time as one of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters of the post-World War II period. Not too long after this article was written he went into self-exile in Mexico.

Shopping from Television (Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)

Before there was an HSN or a QVC – before there was an Adam Freeman or a Mary Beth Roe, there was Your Television Shopper and Leave It To The Girls starring Maggie Johnson and Faye Emerson, respectively. The programs were two of several such shows that aired during the prepubescent days of television broadcasting – and like the shopping shows that came along fifty years later, they, too, moved products off the shelves at a surprising pace.

Click here to read how Hollywood costume designer affected popular fashion…

Puerto Ricans Arrive (Pic Magazine, 1955)

In the early Fifties many of the people from the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico decided to pack their bags and move to New York City. Overnight, it seemed, a portion of Harlem came to be known as Spanish Harlem – where hastily assembled mambo dance halls could be found among restaurants serving the exotic cuisine of the Caribbean. There were also complications that emerged with the new comers that are addressed in this 1955 article:

Today, however, there is a forceful change taking place, an influence so great that New York City officials have forecast a startling racial shift within a few years and are already making plans for meeting this switch…

The Gathering Storm: 1860 (The Southern Rebellion, 1867)

Attached is a printable chronology of important events that took place four months prior to the American Civil War.

December, 1860, was a busy month for Secessionists, with all sorts of gatherings, hand shaking and back-slapping; while in Washington the elected representatives to the U.S. Congress from the state of South Carolina resigned.

In North Carolina, U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson (1805 – 1871) gets a sense of what is coming down the pike and removes his troops from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter.

The Anglo-Saxon North and the Latin – American South in 1910 (Review of Reviews, 1910)

The United States has always viewed the other American countries…with an invincible disdain – a disdain that could not remain a secret to the Young Latins, since it cannot be readily concealed; or, to speak more exactly it has never regarded the nations of Spanish and Portuguese origin as really it’s equal.

As Europe Sees Us (The Smart Set, 1921)

George Jean Nathan (1882 – 1958) and H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956) surmised that as the Europeans bury their many dead among the damp, depressing ruins of World War One, America is neither admired or liked very much: the English owe us money, the Germans smart under their defeat, the French lament that they are no longer able to rob and debauch our infantry.

-Read an Article About the First World War and the Gratitude of France-

Bertrand Russell on American Idealism (The Literary Digest, 1922)

British thinker Bertrand Russell (1872-1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) used to get mighty hot under the collar when the topic of 1922 American society came up and this report is just one example. On a speaking tour in the United States, the Cambridge Professor opined that

love of truth [is] obscured in America by commercialism of which pragmatism is the philosophical expression; and love of our neighbor kept in fetters by Puritan morality.

He would have none of the thinking that America’s main concern for jumping into the meat grinder of 1914-1918 was entirely inspired by wounded France and poor little Belgium but was rather an exercise in American self-interest.