In a land where white is the color of mourning and black is the color of ceremony, where newspapers are read from right to left, this may have been a logical strategy. It was annunciated last week by the head of the Japanese government, Premiere Kantaro Suzuki… The upside-down Japanese mind could make the cost of conquest terribly expensive in American lives.
Larry Parks (1914 – 1975) was an Hollywood movie actor. His career arched from bit player and supporting roles to top billing before his career was virtually ended when he admitted to having once been a member of the Communist Party USA; his candor soon led to his being blacklisted by all the Hollywood studios.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here are the six who top the FBI list of most dangerous lady criminals-at-large; find one and you may prevent murder…
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.
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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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.
Appearing in their monthly column, Repitition Generale, H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan briefly explored the reoccurring topic regarding Hollywood immorality:
So long as the majority of figures in the field of movies are recruited from the social and aesthetic slums, so long will the smell of Lime house cling to the movie’s scandals.
Speaking of moral corruption, read this article about the actor Errol Flynn…
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.
Contrary to the headline written above, this interesting article does not simply discuss the (temporary) Japanese rejection of European and American clothing in the Twenties but also touches upon earlier days when Western styles were fully embraced by the nobility of that country.
There is in Japan a growing revolt against European clothing…The Japanese have endured agonies in their efforts to get our hats, our trousers, our corsets…
Contrary to the headline written above, this interesting article does not simply discuss the (temporary) Japanese rejection of European and American clothing in the Twenties but also touches upon earlier days when Western styles were fully embraced by the nobility of that country.
There is in Japan a growing revolt against European clothing…The Japanese have endured agonies in their efforts to get our hats, our trousers, our corsets…
Although the U.S. President Woodrow Wilson asked Americans to be neutral in thought and deed on all matters concerning the war in Europe [before to April, 1917], the sympathies of the American people firmly stood with the French and their allies. Whether they served as soldiers or non-combatants, the American public was proud of those young Americans who expressed their outrage by volunteering to serve among the French or British armies. Numbered in that group was the Poet Alan Seeger
French novelist Pierre Loti (né Julien Viaud: 1850 – 1923) filed this dispatch from a forward aid station in the the French sector where he witnessed the suffering of the earliest gas attack casualties:
A place of horror which one would think Dante had imagined. The air is heavy, stifling; two or three little night lamps, which look as if they were afraid of giving too much light, hardly pierce the hot, smoky darkness which smells of fever and sweat. Busy people are whispering anxiously. But you hear, more than all, agonized gasping. These gaspings escape from a number of little beds drawn up close together on which are distinguished human forms, above all, chests, chests that are heaving too strongly, too rapidly, and that raise the sheets as if the hour of the death rattle had already come.
Click here to read about the new rules for warfare that were written as a result of the First World War – none of them pertain to poison gas.
This letter was clipped from a German newspaper and subsequently appeared in a British magazine some months later; it was written in response to a letter from a 13 year-old German girl who wrote to her brother at the front. She encouraged him in his sad, murderous work in her letter that was positively dripping with an affected air of trench-swagger. Outraged that his school-age sister should make such a vulgar suggestion, the soldier’s response was admirable and seemed much like the prose of Erich Maria Remarque.
The Immigration Act of 1924 denied admission to the United States to wives of American citizens if these wives are of a race ineligible for citizenship. Hindus, Chinese and Japanese are ineligible. Hence the curious and cruel fact that while an Oriental merchant with his wife may enter America, the wedded wife of an American-born citizen is held at the coast for deportation.
