Recent Articles

The End of the War in Berlin (Yank Magazine, 1945)

YANK correspondent Mack Morris wandered through the fallen Nazi capital of Berlin two days after it’s collapse and recorded his observations:

There were Russians in the the square, dancing and a band played. In Unter den Linden were the bodies of dead civilians, the dust of their famous street like grease paint on their faces.


Click here to read about the German surrender proceedings that took place in the French city of Reims on May 6, 1945.


Click here to read about the inmate rebellions that took place at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Triblinka.

The Depression and Humor of President Lincoln (National Park Service, 1956)

This 1956 article addressed the issue of Lincoln’s depression:

Lincoln’s story telling proclivities were well known in his own time. On the old eighth circuit in Illinois his humor and fund of anecdotes were proverbial. What was not so well known was that the tall, homely man needed a blanket of humor to suppress the fires of depression, gloom, and sense of tragedy that almost consumed him.


Click here to read about Lincoln, the joke teller.

The Critics of FDR’s Supreme Court Scheme (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Attached are seven thumbnail arguments against FDR’s court scheme that were circulating around the country at that time:

[The President’s] move is dictated by expediency and not by a long-range view and that it comes only because the Supreme Court has decided against New Deal legislation 11 out of 16 times.

Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph (American Legion Monthly, 1936)

This chill November morning the Cenotaph is surrounded by serried masses of men. Up and down Whitehall as far as one can see are thousands and thousands packed in so tightly they cannot move…Suddenly from St. James Park comes the sound of a gun. They used to say it was impossible for a British crowd to be quiet. That was before Armistice Day. For the hum of London dies at the sound of the gun…Somewhere in the distance a horse paws the ground and neighs. A flag flaps in the breeze. Never such a silence as this. A King and his people pause sixty seconds in solemn celebration for the dead. It is the Great Hush.

The Birth of Hollywood Filmmaking (America, 1932)

2013 Anno Domini marked the 100th anniversary of the Hollywood film industry. With this in mind it is entirely fitting and proper that we post this thumbnail history that outlines how it all got rolling, as told by the jaded Robert Sherwood, an early film critic who witnessed much of it (although he incorrectly dated the first Hollywood feature film to 1912).

Hollywood history begins with four men: Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, Dustin Farnum and a silent film called The Squaw Man…


(The fourth name in Sherwood’s list was that of Samuel Goldwyn – who, in fact, had nothing to do with the production, but whose name in Hollywood had such staying power it seemed difficult to imagine that he didn’t.)


Read a 1951 profile of a future First Lady: the young Nancy Reagan.

The Stalin-Hitler Non-Aggression Pact (Pathfinder, 1948)

During the April of 1945 elements of the U.S. First Army barreled across the countryside of central Germany. Coming across the chateau outside of the Harz Mountain village of Degenershausen it must have seemed to them to be just another pretty pile of high class European rocks, just like all the other ones they’d been stumbling upon since D-Day – but they soon found that the joint was used to house many of the records of pertaining to German diplomacy between the years 1871 through 1944. This article lays bare some of the hidden details in the agreement that was struck between foreign ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop in 1939; the treaty that came to be known as the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact.


Read about the earliest post-war sightings of Hitler: 1945-1955
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Hollywood Star Condemns the Draft (Photoplay Magazine, 1917)

The silent film actor J. Warren Kerrigan (1882 – 1947; played in such films as Captain Blood, Samson and Delilah and The Covered Wagon) was singled out for ridicule following a poorly conceived remark that all artists should be exempted from military service. The editors of Photoplay Magazine counter-attacked with a short list of the creative souls who have served regardless of their talents to entertain or provoke thought.

Apparently getting skewered in the press had no effect on him; he still wouldn’t register for the draft for another thirteen months.

The Russian Nobility Struggled in Exile (Vogue Magazine, 1922)

Luciene Murat (1876 – 1951?), a distinguished member of the French nobility wrote this Vogue article shortly after her return from Turkey in 1922. It is the sort of column that could only have been written by an over-indulged member of the post-war European high-society types, which makes it all the more enjoyable to read. Her reminiscences of her visit to the city of Pera are especially interesting for the observations made regarding the recently displaced White Russians of her acquaintance who reluctantly resided there in some discomfort.

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