This is an article about St. Matthew Luthern Church for the Deaf and the good work of Reverend Daniel Hodgson.
Not a sound can be heard by most of the congregation, but that doesn’t stop them from worshiping in a full church service – hymns included.
Music critic and scholar Isaac Goldberg (1887 – 1938) reviewed the opening performance of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for the editors of STAGE MAGAZINE:
Why the Jew of the North should, in time, take up the song of the Southern Negro and fuse into a typically American product is an involved question. Perhaps, underneath the jazz rhythms and the general unconventionality of musical process lies the common history of an oppressed minority, and an ultimately Oriental origin. In any case, the human focus of this particular type of musical Americanism has been, from the very first notes, George Gershwin.
Here is a 1945 article about the Croatian-born American ballerina Mia Slavenska (1916 – 2002) and her popularity. The article divides its column space between telling us about the dancer and providing a brief history of ballet – and how it was once joined at the hip with opera.
A much admired theatrical set designer was the author of this column – he was devoted to his craft and believed deeply that movies could only lead society to the lowest place:
The Drama in the Cinema is held to be made ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ It is really made by the new school of the same old tyrants, to enslave the mind of the people.
An article from Click Magazine designed for civilian consumption concerning the U.S. Signal Corps and their efforts to film and photograph as much of the war as was possible in order that the brass hats far off to the rear could sit comfortably and understand what was needed. The article is illustrated with six war photographs and the captions explaining what information was gleaned from each:
Every detail of these films is scrupulously studied by a group of experts, officers and engineers representing the Army Ground Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Army Air Corps, the Signal Corps the Armored Forces, the Quartermaster Corps and other military units. Naturally, these services are interested in different sections of every film. To facilitate their studies, a device known as the Multiple Film Selector is used.
The Signal Corps Movies of World War I were intended for different uses…
Here is a very brief study of U.S. congressional anti-lynching legislation spanning the years from 1901 through 1922.
Click here for the Ku Klux Klan Archive.
This article tells the story of a certain Antoni Cierplikowski – better known as Antoine of Paris (1884 – 1976). He was the premiere hairdresser throughout much of the last century and his illustrious client list included many names that you would recognize. Yet, to simply write the man off as a celebrity hairstylist is to ignore his myriad innovations:
• Antoine was the creator of the Bob.
• He created the Perm.
• He was the first to tint gray hair to blue.
• He was the first to apply a lacquer to hair as a fixative.
• Antoine was the first to tinge isolated elements within a hairdo blond as a streaked highlight.
No one perhaps has done as much as the British writer who calls himself George Orwell to persuade former fellow-travelers that their ways lie in some direction other than the Stalinist party line.
So begin the first two paragraphs of this book review that are devoted to the anti-totalitarian elements that animated the creative side of the writer George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair: 1903 – 1950). The novel that is reviewed herein, Coming Up for Air, was originally published in 1939 and was reviewed by Pathfinder Magazine to mark the occasion of the book’s first American printing in 1950.
An article written at a time when L.A. was a very different city – with a population of merely ten million, the city’s detractors often called it Iowa by the sea; today they compare it to the Balkans:
The point is that in [1950] Los Angeles the individual leads his own life and plays his own games rather than lose himself vicariously in the capers of professionals.
Click here to read about the San Fernando Valley.
These historic pen portraits were compiled and re-worked for publication some fifty years after the San Francisco Earthquake; together they serve to illustrate the collective, yet individual, acts of suffering and heroics that took place April 18, 1906:
On the front steps of an abandoned house she had seen a young Chinese mother nursing a baby. The mother’s face was besmirched, and drawn with weariness. Her own child slept in swaddling blankets beside her. The child on her breast was white.
The week the French Army collapsed was the week Hollywood experienced the greatest number of production delays. Studio wags believed it was an indicator as to just how many European refugees were employed on their stages. Studio bosses banned all radio and newspapers from their properties in hopes that each production would maintain their respective schedules.
The greatest deception deployed by the German Army during the the Ardennes Offensive was to parachute Nazi commandos into the American lines – men who had been raised in the U.S. and spoke the language well. They wore American uniforms and performed heinous acts of sabotage, and as this article spells out, lured many GIs to their deaths.
Two of these Germans attempted to kidnap and assassinate General Eisenhower, click here to read about it…
Attached is a stirring collection of eyewitness accounts by the American survivors of the Malmedy Massacre (December 17, 1944) that took place during the Battle of the Bulge.
The German officer in the car stood up, took deliberate aim with a pistol at an American medical officer in the front rank of the prisoners and fired. As the medical officer fell, the Germans fired again and another American dropped. Immediately two tanks at the end of the field opened up with their machine guns on the defenseless prisoners…
By thew war’s end it was revealed that 43% of American prisoners of war had died in Japanese camps; by contrast, 1% had died in German POW camps.
Click here to read about the Nazi murder of an American Jewish P.O.W.
Well, here they are: the songs of the Nazi hit parade – all the ditties you’ve loved tapping your toes to – songs like Storm Troops on the March, or Up, Up, To Strife, Nation to Arms and who can forget that old classic: Wessle Song…
It doesn’t get much better than this.
Today shadows have fallen upon the once-proud German universities. The professors have been forced out of the temples of learning or driven into exile or subjected to a subtle pressure which has changed their academic detachment into clumsy conformity with Hitler’s ideals. Today shadows have fallen upon the once-proud German universities. The professors have been forced out of the temples of learning or driven into exile or subjected to a subtle pressure which has changed their academic detachment into clumsy conformity with Hitler’s ideals.
Click here to read Hitler’s plan for German youth.
Award winning word-smith Hanson W. Baldwin (1903 – 1991) wrote this tight little essay some 64 years after the Titanic sinking. He succinctly pieced together the events of that day (April 12, 1912) and clearly indicated that there was plenty of blame to go around for the tremendous loss of life; not simply the Grand Poobahs in the senior positions (Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay) but the small fries as well (such as Second Radio Operator Harold McBride). By the second page, Baldwin commences with an hour by hour break-down of the events on-board TITANIC until she made her final plunge into the deep:
12:30 a.m. The word is passed: ‘Women and children in the boats’. Stewards finish waking passengers below; life-preservers are tied on; some men smile at the precaution.
‘The Titanic is unsinkable.’
For those who keep records of the harsh treatment dolled out to religious sects by the various assorted tyrannical governments of the world, China is the all-time champion. Since it’s inception, the People’s Republic of China has attempted to coerce or eradicate every religious faith within its borders. Here is an account by an eyewitness to the many assorted atrocities dished out to the Christians in China by the followers of Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976.
An article about Soviet persecution of religious adherents can be read here…
Remembered as the poetic soul who penned the famous Holocaust verse, First they came for…, Martin Niemöller (Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller 1892 – 1984) is characterized in this 1935 article as a remarkably brave theologian who was challenging the Nazi Reichsbishop Ludwig Mueller and Dr. Alfred Rosenberg for their assault on the Protestant Churches in Germany:
Now Niemöller is resisting the attack of the German Christian Party, a neopaganistic movement, on the old Protestant faith, in fact. He was not molested when he read to his congregation the manifesto of the Confessional Synod’ Brotherhood Council.All most know that there is a bitter propaganda campaign against the Church under way. We must fight against this and for active, not passive, Christianity.
Those sensitive beta-males in the editorial offices of Confederate Veteran were teary-eyed and waxing winsome that day in 1918 when they saw fit to recall one particular long-standing Southern institution that was gone with the wind:
The most unique character connected with the days of slavery was the old black mammy, who held a position of and confidence in nearly every white family of importance in the South… She was an important member of the household, and for her faithfulness and devotion she has been immortalized in the literature of the South.
