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The Imperial Wizard
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

Fat, shrewd-smiling, garrulous Old Doc Evans (Hiram Evans, 1881 – 1966) is still Emperor and Imperial Wizard, but he’s now apparently only fronting for a Big Boss who has some sensational new plans which have already begun to click. Once again the Klan is holding hands with politicians all over the country, but the hand-holding is being done under the table. The big drive begins in May

‘The Strange Story Behind GONE WITH THE WIND”
(Coronet Magazine, 1961)

What was the real origin of Gone with the Wind? Margaret Mitchell (1900 – 1949) referred to a simple incident in her childhood. One afternoon, her mother took her on a buggy ride through the countryside around Atlanta, showing her all the once proud plantation homes that stood in crumbling shame from the Civil War, and others that were symbols of revival and progress. The impression never left her. Gone with the Wind, she said, was the story of Georgians who survived and those who didn’t.


In this article a book reviewer questions why anyone thought the novel was so great.

Eric Satie Goes After the Critics
(Vanity Fair, 1921)

There is little doubt that the French Composer Eric Satie had wished that the bellyaching dilettantes who were charged with the task of writing music reviews for the Paris papers had spent more time in school in order that they might show greater erudition in their writings. However, Satie recognized that we can’t change the past and so he took his critics out to the woodshed with this column.

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Will Prohibition Create More Drug Users?
(The Literary Digest, 1922)

It stands to reason that when one addictive drug disappears, the users will seek another drug to serve as a substitute – and although Wikipedia stated that drug addiction rose 44.6% throughout the course of Prohibition, this 1922 article reported that (at least for the first three years of the law) narcotics use remained at it’s pre-1919 levels.


Click here to read about the problems of American drug addicts in the Forties…

Letters from Vietnam
(Coronet Magazine, 1967)

[Here is] a portrait of the war by those who know it best – the men at the front… In these affecting pages are the unadorned voices of men and women who fought – and, in some cases, fell – in America’s most controversial war. They bring new insights and imagery to a conflict that still haunts our hearts, consciences, and the conduct of our foreign policy.

‘Why Germany Must Pay”
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

The war that Germany began and lost cost the Allies, according to a recent estimate, the stupendous total of $177,000,000,000. The Reparations Commission has named a principal sum of about $32,000,000,000 as the damages for which reparations by Germany is due under the Treaty of Versailles. The Supreme Council of the Allies, sitting at Paris in January, placed the amount to be paid by Germany at a present value of $21,000,000,000, which when paid with interest and in installments covering forty-two years, would amount to about $55,000,000,000.

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Jesus In The Old Testament
(Book of Psalms)

For believers in Christ, Psalm 22 is the most curious of all of the 150 Psalms. It catches our imaginations not simply because our Savior quoted from it during His final hours, but because it makes a reference to the practice of crucifixion centuries before the torture was ever conceived. It also anticipates His thirst, the coming of the church and the distributing of His garments among His tormentors. We have highlighted these verses and illustrated the prophetic aspects of the psalm with quotes from a recent book on the topic.

FDR’s Continuing Failures
(New Outlook, 1935)

When FDR’s first term reached the half-way mark the editor of New Outlook, Francis Walton, sat down at his typewriter and summarized the new president’s record:

It is a record of action – mostly ill-considered. It is a record of astounding failures. It is a record of abandoned experiments smilingly excused and apologized for by their perpetrator even before they were undertaken… It is a record against which natural recovery is waging a super-human struggle to reach us.

The Fascisti
(Current Opinion, 1921)

A tight little essay that clarifies the force behind Italian fascism. This was an editorial penned by Dr. Frank Crane, a pastor who appeared regularly in the pages of CURRENT OPINION.

The Fascisti is a name given to a political party in Italy. Political parties, and indeed almost all organizations, as has often been pointed out, hold together and get their strength by hating something. The Fascisti hate the Bolshevists, Communists and the like.


Click here to read about those who resisted Mussolini.

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Russia’s Women Soldiers of W.W. I
(Literary Digest, 1917)

The attached news article from 1917 reported on the a Russian combat unit that consisted entirely of women soldiers called The Battalion of Death:

The courage of the Battalion of Death when the actual test came is the subject of many enthusiastic Petrograd dispatches. They behaved splendidly under fire, penetrating into a first-line trench of the Germans and brought back prisoners.

He Made the Pictures Move
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

Ten million people a day go to the movies in the United States, but how many of them know who made the first movie? The Noes have it. The man who made the first motion-picture, as we know it today, is C. Francis Jenkins (1867 – 1934). Many [actresses] who have not been ‘in pictures’ a month are better known.


C. Francis Jenkins was also one of the brainiacs who contributed his talent to the invention of television.

Down With Christian Dior and His ”New Look”!
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1947)

The California fashion critic who penned this article believed that the fashions of Christian Dior stood firmly in opposition to the optimistic, Twentieth Century casual elegance of Claire McCardell (1905 – 1958) and Adrian (1903 – 1959). She could not bare Dior, with his vulgar penchant to spin

the feminine figure in the unconventional manner, trying to make her look good where she ain’t. He seeks the ballet dancer illusion – natural, rounded shoulders, too weak to support a struggling world…Her waist is pinched in an exaggerated indentation, the better to emphasize her padded hips…There are butterfly sleeves, box pockets, belled jackets, and barreled skirts, suggesting something like a Gibson girl, or whatever grandmother should have worn.


Click here to read a 1961 article about Jacqueline Kennedy’s influence on American fashion.

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The Biggest Investor In The War
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

Here is an article that deals with the money aspect of the First World War. Illustrated with two tables, the journalist explains that the United States laid out far more money than any of the combatant nations. Albeit the funds extended were in the form of loans to the Entente powers rather than the creation of their own military, in the end the U.S. ended up being the one nation that invested the most in the war.

What the Stenographer Saw…
(Atlantic Monthly, 1930)

The attached recollection was written by a British woman who worked as a stenographer at the American embassy in London. She recalled much of what she saw from the typing pool on that dreadful August day in 1914 when the Great War began.

Sergeant York
(Literary Digest, 1919)

Sergeant Alvin York (1887 – 1964) of the 328th Infantry Regiment, Eighty-Second Division, was one of the great heroes of the First World War. The attached four page article recalled those deeds as well as his glorious trip to New York City where he was luxuriated at the Waldorf Astoria and feted by the swells of Gotham.

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‘The Americans in the Argonne Won the War”
(You Can’t Print That, 1929)



Here is a segment of the famous interview with General Paul von Hindenburg that was conducted just days after the close of hostilities in which the journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) posed the question as to which of the Allied Armies played the most decisive roll in defeating Germany; whereupon the General responded:


The American infantry in the Argonne won the war.


Read on…


Click here to read about sexually transmitted diseases among the American soldiers of the First World War…

‘The Americans in the Argonne Won the War”
(You Can’t Print That, 1929)



Here is a segment of the famous interview with General Paul von Hindenburg that was conducted just days after the close of hostilities in which the journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) posed the question as to which of the Allied Armies played the most decisive roll in defeating Germany; whereupon the General responded:


The American infantry in the Argonne won the war.


Read on…


Click here to read about sexually transmitted diseases among the American soldiers of the First World War…

‘The Americans in the Argonne Won the War”
(You Can’t Print That, 1929)



Here is a segment of the famous interview with General Paul von Hindenburg that was conducted just days after the close of hostilities in which the journalist George Seldes (1890 – 1995) posed the question as to which of the Allied Armies played the most decisive roll in defeating Germany; whereupon the General responded:


The American infantry in the Argonne won the war.


Read on…


Click here to read about sexually transmitted diseases among the American soldiers of the First World War…

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