Recent Articles

June 6, 1944 (Pathfinder Magazine, 1944)

That was the way D-Day began, the second front the Allies had waited for for two years. It came like a shadow in the English midnight… The Nazi news agency, DNB, flashed the first story at 12:40 a.m. on June 6, Eastern wartime. Before dawn, British and American battleships were pounding shells into Havre, Caen and Cherbourg, high-booted skymen of the [88th] and 101st U.S.A. paratroop divisions had dropped into the limestone ridges of the Seine valley and landing barges filled with American, Canadian and British infantrymen nosed up to the beaches along the estuaries of the Orne and Seine rivers.

The First 100 Hours (Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

Perched on the quarter deck of an LST off the coast of one of the American beachheads during the D-Day invasion, COLLIER’S war correspondent, W.B. Courtney, described the earliest hours of that remarkable day:

I stared through my binoculars at some limp, dark bundles lying a little away from the main activities. In my first casual examination of the beach I had assumed they were part of the debris of defensive obstacles. But they were bodies – American bodies.

Four Glider Pilots on D-Day (Yank Magazine, 1944)

A three page article about the unique experiences of four American glider pilots on D-Day; how they fared after bringing their infantry-heavy gliders down behind German lines, what they saw and how they got back to the beach.

The President’s Prayer (National Archive)

On the evening of D-Day, President Roosevelt led a radio audience estimated at 100,000,000 in a prayer of his own composing:


Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor… Lead them straight and true… Their road will be long and hard… Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them.

1910 and The Growing Popularity of the ”Flickers” (Review of Reviews, 1910)

An informative and well-illustrated column that makes reference to various copy cat crimes that were first seen on movie screens as early as 1908 and duplicated in the real world. The reader will come away with a clear understanding as to just how popular the medium was in the United States and throughout the globe.

Modern Dance: Spreading the News (Literary Digest, 1933)

Quoting the apostles of Modern Dance quite liberally, this article presents for the reader their impassioned defense as to why the era of a new dance form had arrived and why it was deserving of global attention and much needed in America’s schools. The column centers on the goings-on at Teacher’s College, N.Y.C., where a certain Mary P. O’Donnell once ran the roost at that institution’s dance department; it was O’Donnell’s plan to send her minions out in all directions like the 12 Apostles of Christ, spreading the good news to all God’s creatures that Modern Dance had arrived.

The Boy at Vicksburg (Literary Digest, 1912)

After reading the attached article, we concluded that baby-sitters must have been pretty hard to come by in the 1860s – and perhaps you’ll feel the same way, too, should you choose to read these columns that concern the recollections of Frederick Dent Grant (1850 – 1912) – son of General Ulysses S. Grant, who brought his son (who was all of 13 years-old at the time) to the blood-heavy siege of Vicksburg in the summer of 1863. The struggles he witnessed must have appealed to the boy, because he grew up to be a general, too.

The Champ is Gone (PM Tabloid, 1945)

This highly personal column appeared in one of New York City’s evening papers and seemed characteristic of the feeling experienced by much of the U.S. after hearing about the unexpected death of President Roosevelt.
Written by Joe Cummiskey, the column stands out as the type of remembrance that is thoroughly unique to those who write about sports all day long, which is who Mr. Commiskey was:

Somehow or other, if you were in sports, you never thought of FDR so much as connected with the high office which he held. Rather, you remembered him most the way he’d chuckle, getting ready to throw out the the first ball to open the baseball season. Or how he’d sit on the 50 at the Army-Navy game…

1920s Road Rage (The American Magazine, 1927)

Is it possible for a person to drive an automobile and remain a human being?

Do gasoline and courtesy mix?

Can you tell me why Ottis Throckmorton Whoozies, secretary of the Golden Rule Society, will smile sweetly, lift his hat and say graciously, ‘I beg your pardon. I’m really awfully sorry. Please excuse me,’ when he accidentally steps on a strange woman’s foot in a theater lobby, yet will lean out and make faces at his own grandmother if she fails to slow up her flivver and allow him to ‘cut in’ on a congested highway?

There’s something about a windshield that distorts a man’s outlook on life.


Click here to read about Lincoln, the joke teller.

The Back-Hand from a Flapper (Flapper Magazine, 1922)

Flapper Magazine crowned itself the

official organ of the national flapper’s flock

If nothing else, this verbiage simply spells out that the editors took themselves very, very seriously indeed and it was in that same spirit they gleefully went to work disemboweling a movie that they saw as anti-flapper to its very core. The film in question was

Nice People (Paramount, 1922) starring Bebe Daniels and Wallace Reid. Produced by Willam C. deMille (1878 – 1955), elder brother of Cecil, the film makers were clearly intimating that nice people will always keep their flapper daughters in line; it is at that point in the flick when the reviewer dipped her pen in the ink:

This is one of the themes that ‘old fogies‘ usually delight in; the ‘reformation’ of the flapper… The picture is replete with pithy subtitles, such as ‘the smart girl of today removes the rouge from her lips only to kiss and make up.’

Scroll to Top