Here is a short profile of Irna Phillips (1901 – 1973) – she was, more than anyone else, the one who can be credited with the creation of the daytime dramas called soap operas on both radio and television.
During America’s short and costly participation in the First World War, a prominent New York clothing establishment, Brooks Brothers, did swift business making custom uniforms for both the Army and Navy.
As the following attachment will show, they also offered forty other items that were of use to both the officers as well as the ranks.
Click here to see a Vanity Fair editorial about Christmas gifts for Doughboys.
These three pages were from the last of the two wartime Christmas issues American Vogue had managed to produce prior to the Armistice. Featured are some fashionable accessory items sold on New York’s Fifth Avenue that the Vogue editors deemed suitable for industrial warfare.
Click here to read about the Sam Brown Belt.
Written a few months after the war began, this German short story was written about a particular front line rifle company and the contempt that they shared for one of their officers. Its a good read.
This article originally appeared in a French magazine and it lists numerous cultures, both ancient and modern, that eat dogs regularly:
We do not know the edible dog or the edible cat, in France, and probably since the siege they have been little served (openly at least) on the tables of Paris restaurants. At Peking, and throughout China, there is no dainty repast without its filet or leg of dog; the cat is rather a dish of the poorer classes.
At long last the impact of of total war had bruised the American consciousness. Despite the initial success of General MacArthur’s victory on Luzon and the Russians on the Eastern front, the first three weeks of 1945 had brought the nation face to face with the realities ahead as at no time since Pearl Harbor. No single factor could this metamorphosis be attributed, but it was plain that the stark lists of causalities and the growing hardships at home had contributed to it.
In 1921 a Kyoto Bible school was challenged by a neighboring Buddhist temple. The confrontation did not involve the finer points of theology (not openly, anyway) but which of the two tribes was superior at baseball. It was a Hell of a game.
The uncredited foreign correspondent made it known within the opening paragraphs that the Kyoto Buddhists were irked by the spread of Christianity in that region of Japan and chose to deploy any means at their disposal to gain some sort of advantage.
Twenty-one years later a Japanese team would play an American team. Read about that game here…
As a phenomenon in the history of the show business and among all children, Shirley Temple (1928 – 2014) stands as absolutely unique. For four successive years she has led all other stars in the film industry as the number one box office attraction of the world. But Shirley’s influence has been wider than this – there is no country in the world, both civilized and uncivilized where at some time or another her pictures have not been shown.
In a few weeks Shirley’s fan mail reached avalanche proportions, with with the result in her next film, Bright Eyes
Confronting the issue of growing unrest in British Palestine, Winston Churchill cautioned the British colonial administrators to soothe the tempers of the Arabs in Palestine by limiting the growth of the Jewish population.
Novelist Taylor Caldwell (Born Janet Miriam Holland Taylor Caldwell: 1900 – 1985) recalled the bleak days of the Great Depression – and the perpetual appearance of American socialist who seemed always to be in recruitment mode.
Open or crypto-Communists, they had one unwavering theme: Communism was a System with a Heart. Communism was the new Christianity. Communism was the savior of the working people. America must become Communistic, if it was to pull out of the Great Depression. The Light of the World was not in my church. It was in Moscow.
Click here to read further about American Communists during the Great Depression…
In 1887 the NEW YORK TIMES reviewed the first english edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it…
