Like many Americans in the Twenties, the journalist who penned the attached article was totally irked by the concept of an American territory – bound for statehood – having a majority Asian population. He wrote at a time when the nation was deeply concerned about assimilating America’s immigrants and his indignation can clearly be sensed.
Well, Monsieur, did I ever tell you about the time I was a Doughboy in the Great war?
This is the story of Marie Marvingt (1875 – 1963), an amazing French woman who did indeed serve in the forward trenches disguised as a man during the Summer of 1917.
Newton Wilson, a modest, quiet, somewhat academic man who never leaps before he looks through, in and around a situation, became the 20th Century innovator of precise recipes; a sort of Fanny Farmer of flying.
Click here to read about the earliest airline stewardesses…
A 1945 Yank Magazine article concerning American teen culture on the W.W. II home front in which the journalist/anthropologist paid particular attention to the teen-age slang of the day.
Some of today’s teenagers —pleasantly not many — talk the strange new language of sling swing. In this bright lexicon of the good citizens of tomorrow, a girl with sex appeal is an able Grable or a ready Hedy. A pretty girl is whistle bait. A boy whose mug and muscles appeal to the girls is a mellow man, a hunk of heart break or a glad lad.
To read about one of the fashion legacies of W.W. II, click here…
Click here to learn how the Beatniks spoke.
Click here if you would like to read a glossary of WAC slang terms.
•Suggested Reading• Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang
Greta Garbo (1905 – 1990) was well known for keeping to herself and preferring to act on movie sets free of executives, pals and all sorts of other hangers-on and she was very famous for refusing to grant members of the press corps interviews. With that in mind, it is a wonder that Katherine Albert of PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE was able to piece enough together for this 1930 article:
She has no place in the life of Hollywood. She has never adapted herself to it.
Garbo will continue to remain an enigma…
Click here to read about early cosmetic surgery in Hollywood.
This article was written long before the crumbling Euro and the economic collapse of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Venezuela, East Germany and the USSR – it is an 1894 editorial that outlines why socialism cannot not work:
He insists that all previous Social evolutions have meant an improvement in production and an increase in income, but the peculiarity of the Socialistic programme is that “it is to be not a money-making, but a money-spending evolution,” in which “everybody is to live a great deal better than he has been in the habit of living, and to have far more fun.
This 1946 article argued that Socialism is simply un-American…
Generations before satellite photography, and long before the T.V. cameras were placed on the moon, an American astronomer named V.M. Slipher (1875 – 1969) figured out the predominate color of our planet when seen from afar. Read on…
The Spanish Influenza (February 1918 – April 1920) struck hard in the U.S. Army camps. Every fourth man came down with the flu, every twenty-fourth man caught pneumonia, every sixth man died.
By the time the virus ran its course in the United States 675,000 Americans would succumb (although this article estimated the loss at 500,000).
One of the first American magazine articles heralding the November 4, 1922 discovery of the ancient tomb of King Tutankhamen (1341 BC – 1323 BC) by the British archaeologist Howard Carter (1874 – 1939); who was in this article, erroneously sited as an American:
What is thought may prove the greatest archeological discovery of all time has recently been made in Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor. Two chambers of a tomb have been found filled with the funeral paraphernalia of the Egyptian King Tutankhamen, and hopes are entertained that the third chamber, yet unopened, may contain the royal mummy itself.
This is a profile of the American Cold Warrior James Burnham (1905 – 1987), who is remembered as being one of the co-founders of the conservative monthly, National Review
One year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the Navy released its report to the press with updates on all the various repairs that were put into effect.
The FBI had been tangling Axis spies throughout the mid-to-late Thirties, but with the December 8, 1941, declaration of war the FBI was emboldened with far greater powers. This explains why Director Hoover exclaimed that his agency had just completed the busiest year in its history.
Although his membership in the Communist Party would not be known until he had already been out of the House of Representatives for six years, Hugh De Lacy (1910 – 1986) was easily recognized by his colleagues as quite the radical…
No doubt De Lacy’s favorite presidential candidate was the American socialist Norman Thomas – and you can read about him here…
Black Nazis: Fritz Delfs, leader of the Nazis in Tanganyika, the former German East Africa that Hitler is demanding, soft-pedals Aryan supremacy credo in propounding Nazi ideology, and capitalizes traditional use of the swastika by the natives as a symbol of fertility.
Click here to read about the fall of Paris…
This article looks at the rise of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and House & Garden – recognizing them as highly unique publications for their time. Special attention is paid to publisher Condé Nast and his meteoric rise during the early 20th Century.
The class magazines exude an aura of wealth and their circulations, therefore, are limited. They cater to the fit though few and they do this with slick paper, excellent illustrations and a sycophantic reverence for Society – at thirty-five to fifty cents a copy.
Click here to read about Fortune Magazine…
The attached article is by an unidentified, pointy-headed male, and regardless of the fact that it was written over 100 years ago, many of his reflections regarding fashion and those who are enslaved by it are still relevant in our own time. It all started for this fellow when he felt the urge to understand why such a broad variety of New York women should take to wearing black for each and every occasion and so he polished-up the ol’ cranium, rolled up his sleeves and began to think hard about the nature of fashion. He concluded that the lot of the female fashion victim
is not the ordinary story of women’s victimization, her subjection in a man-made world. She, after all, accepts of herself this silent decree of fashion and rushes to it. It is woman-made, this particular enslavement
This is an eyewitness account of the very first trench raid to have been suffered by the U.S. Army in France; like most first time engagements in American military history, it didn’t go well and resulted in three dead, five wounded, and eleven Americans taken as prisoner. Historians have recorded this event to have taken place on the morning of November 3, 1917, but this participant stated that it all began at
3:00 a.m. on November 2, after a forty-five minute artillery barrage was followed by the hasty arrival of 240 German soldiers, two wearing American uniforms, jumped into their trench and began making quick work out of the Americans within.
The U.S. Army would not launch their own trench raid for another four months.
In the winter of 1938, when one of FDR’s anointed Brain Trusters made an off-the-cuff remark that the Federal Government would take over industry if the economy did not turn around, it must have alarmed many of the industry captains and sent the stock market through the floor. It also moved the eccentric Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955) to put a fresh ribbon in his typewriter and have at it:
The present administration has made a ghastly failure of the business management of this government. It has increased the national indebtedness at the rate of five to ten million dollars every day. It has added more than twenty thousand million dollars to our national debt, and it probably has twenty million or more of our citizens on the dole, or in charity jobs, which is the dole in another form.
