During the Summer of 1943, James F. Byrenes, FDR’s Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization, gave a report on the wartime production output for that period. 1943 proved to have been a turning point for the Allied war efforts on both fronts.
Here is a moving account of the meteoric rise of Johnny Mathis (b. 1935) – from an impoverished child of the San Francisco slums to the last of the great-American crooners.
Johnny Mathis is just 23 years old , though he appears a hungry , vulnerable 17. When he sings a romantic ballad in high falsetto, his large eyes gaze out over the heads of the audience as if in search of someone.
A 1938 article covering the ascent of Reichfurhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler (1900 – 1945):
Himmler has dossiers on every man of substance in Germany. Nazi party functionary, business leader, churchman, diplomat, army officer or statesman; all are nicely indexed for the day when their case histories might be needed in a hurry. Because in Germany, everyone is suspect. Some Nazis will even tell you that Himmler has a dossier on himself.
Click here to read an eyewitness account of the suicide of Himmler.
Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler.
A day by day account by Private George Groh, a member of the 101st Airborne, who joined the 1944 Normandy Invasion as a glider-infantryman.
We were surprised to learn that even in this multicultural era of unenforced immigration laws – the last name Smith still stands as the most common surname in the United States – and as of 2021 there are 2,627,141 people with this last name living today. This article points out that there is always at any given time a Smith serving in Congress (currently that duty falls on the shoulders of Representative Chris Smith, who hails from the 4th District of New Jersey).
This article is about the chemist Dr. Leo Hendrik Baekeland (1863 – 1944) – who left the world a far more plastic place than when he had found it.
When watching the old newsreel footage from the two world wars you see a fair amount of American sailors going about their business. They wore a uniform that seemed to have its origins in the Nineteenth Century, with bell bottom trousers and an odd shirt called a jumper. The blue jumper of an American sailor is decorated with various white stripes, stars and topped off with a queer little black silk kerchief; this article seeks to explain what the origins behind them all were largely British.
Callously torn from the binding of the 1949 inaugural program were these pithy paragraphs describing the somber moods of both Lincoln inaugurals. The anonymous author noted that
when Lincoln delivered his Inaugural Address, four future Presidents of the United States stood on the platform near him: Hayes, Garfield, Arthur and Benjamin Harrison.
To read the text of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, click here .
A brief account of the two inaugural ceremonies of President Woodrow Wilson.
The 1913 inauguration was the first to be documented with a motion picture camera.
Read about an attack on President Wilson that was launched by the suffragettes in 1918…
A one page history regarding the unprecedented swearing-in ceremonies of the four-term President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945).
Read a 1933 article about FDR and the disaster that he tried to fix…
A printable trivia test of odd presidential facts regarding the assorted chief executives who have governed the United States at one time or another. Assembled herein is a list of real zingers that will put to the test your knowledge of U.S. history; do you know:
• Who the shortest president was?
• Which president first predicted a one-world government?
• Which president was the greatest student of the Bible?
• Which president kissed 34 little girls at his Inaugural parade?
(HINT: It wasn’t Clinton)
Written twenty years after the event, this article recalls that period when the Lindberghs returned to America after living in Europe for three years. While abroad, Americans were disturbed to read in the press that he chose to keep company with the Fascists of Germany and Italy; after a while American editors found his behavior so unimpressive, they chose not to write about him any longer. Upon his return, prior to the World War II, Lindbergh joined an isolationist movement called the America First Committee. It was at these functions when he began to make assorted racist comments in his speeches – remarks that the press corps could no longer ignore.
When it was made known to Nelson Rockefeller that the muralist he retained to decorate the lobby of his New York Building (Rockefeller Plaza) had taken the liberty of painting the likeness of Lenin in the work, letters were exchanged between the two men. The attached column is an excerpt from a longer piece that pertains to the dust-up.
Ten years after Congress decided to enter the war in Europe, James Truslow Adams (1878 – 1949) wrote this article that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in which he noted that one of the maladies of the modern era was the creation of a new type of collective thinking that celebrated the common man:
Man has always delighted to honor the great…But now for the first time whole nations, and those the most enlightened, have come to honor the man of whom we know nothing: the Unknown Soldier. As a matter of unfortunate fact, the particular body may be that of one who fought the draft to the last ditch and was a slacker in service. That, however, is of course wholly irrelevant; for it is not really the Unknown Soldier who thus receives the almost religious adoration of his people, but the Common Man, for that is what he is intending to typify…
For those who survived it, the Second World War changed many lives – some for better, some for worse. Gale Volchok was rescued from a dreary job in New York retail and delivered to the proving grounds of two different infantry training camps in New Jersey. It was under her watchful eye that thousands of American soldiers learned to throw their enemies into the dirt and generally defend them selves.
One of Conde Nast’s most popular magazines reviewed D.W. Griffith’s film, The Birth of a Nation and gave a somewhat balanced account of the production. The journalist clearly recognized that the movie was unfair to the Negro yet remarkable for it’s photography.
Here is a collection of French phrases and military vocabulary terms uttered in the combat zones of W.W. I. Translated expressions include the standard commands as well as such bon mots as shell the fort, the walls are shattered, the place is evacuated and for all those World War Two re-enactors, Retreat!.
Click here to read about a case of French Friendly-Fire…
In the early Twenties there were a good many social changes which men had to struggle to understand; among them was the Modern Woman. The Italian novelist and lexicographer Alfredo Panzini (1863 – 1939) attempted to do just that for the editors of Vanity Fair.
‘Don’t expect us’, she says to you, disconsolate male, ‘don’t expect us to be like the old-fashioned girls who went to church, and did the laundry, and looked up to their husbands as to their God.’
