This article appeared in 1936 and reported that the populations of both England and France were being trained in the general use of gas masks in anticipation of a German invasion.
Even babies will be protected in covered perambulators, into which masked ‘Nannies’ can pump air, forcing it through filter cans. Researchers are working on an infant’s mask with a nipple attachment.
Throughout much of World War I, the German-American war correspondent Karl Von Wiegand (1874 – 1961) reported on the goings-on within the Kaiser’s Army for an American new syndicate. As luck would have it, he happened to be in a front line German trench when the British Army launched their enormous attack on July 1, 1916. Here is one of his earlier dispatches from the German side:
We stood awe-stricken. Mankind, like Frankenstein, was being devoured by the monster it had created.
Father Francis P. Duffy (1874 – 1932) was the well-loved regimental chaplain for the illustrious, old New York infantry regiment known as the Fighting 69th.
Next time you find yourself walking near Times Square in New York City, you’ll see a statue erected in his memory situated behind a statue of the popular songster who composed Over There – George M. Cohan (1878 – 1942). These memorials will be found at Broadway and 7th Avenue (between 46th & 47th streets). Both men knew the neighborhood well – to Cohan it was known as the Theater District while Duffy knew it as Hell’s Kitchen, and it was his parish.
The Bookman reviewed Duffy’s memoir
You can can read more about Father Duffy’s war here…
Click here to read articles about W.W. I poetry.
Herschel Grynszpan (1921 – ?) was a Polish-Jewish refugee born in Germany who, on his own volition, shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris in 1938. This murder prompted the Nazis to terrorize the Jewish population throughout Germany and Austria the very next day (November 8) in an event that was called Kristallnacht. This article covers the murder and the senseless horror that followed; attention was also paid to the reactions from various capital cities.
In Vienna, Storm Troopers fired 18 synagogues, shot a Polish Jew in his bed, invaded homes and threw the furniture out the windows. Ten thousand Jews were arrested, at least 60 attempted suicide. Restaurants and grocery stores refused to sell to Jewas.
Walking into Hiroshima in broad daylight, wearing an American uniform and knowing that you were one of the first Americans the people in that utterly ruined city had laid eyes on since the bombing, was not a comfortable feeling.
After the war it was discovered that one quarter of the Hiroshima dead were Koreans who were there as slave laborers.
The October 3, 1946 issue of the Atlanta Constitution ran a front page headline declaring that Imperial Japan had successfully tested their own Atom Bomb during the summer of ’45. Click here to read more on this topic.
Click here to read General Marshal’s opinions regarding the Atomic Bomb.
Attached is the reminiscence of a movie-goer named Homer Dunne who recalled his feelings upon first attending a moving photograph show during the closing days of the Nineteenth Century. He described well the appearance of the rented shop-front, the swanky ticket-taker, the unimpressed audience and has a laugh on himself for failing to understand the significance of the medium.
Renowned as an earthly paradise from whose rich soil the brilliant sun draws abundant crops of semi-tropical fruits, the Great Valley is today the state’s principal source of wealth. Last week, Californians were acutely conscious that the valley could also produce squalor, misery, disease and death…[The San Joaquin Valley] is host to 70,000 jobless, homeless families living in frightful squalor and privation….hopeless men and women sprawled in the sun as their ill-clad children played in the dirt.
Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…
The Sexual Revolution began slowly building with the release of the Kinsey Report in 1948 (read about that here) and from that point on the whole ball of thread began to unravel. More and more mainstream magazines, that previously would never have done so, began publishing articles about sexual concerns: adultery, frigidity and homosexuality. Hollywood went right along for the ride; TV was slow to follow, but following nonetheless. By the time 1967 came around the social war on the old taboos was in full flower. This article concerns the new standards that came into place all across America in 1968. When this article went to press, the two most infamous assassinations of 1968 had not yet taken place – after that, the flood gates would open – but change was in the air.
More about the lowering of moral standards in American popular culture can be read here…
Attached is an interesting article that announced the Nazi march into the Rhineland as well as the island of Hegoland. The journalist also listed various other Versailles Treaty violations:
• The treaty said that Germany should have no troops in the Rhineland. On March 7 of this year, they marched in.
• The treaty said that Germany should never have a conscript army. On March 16 of this year, conscription was announced by Chancellor Hitler.
• It said that Germany should have no military aviation. She has it.
• It said that the Great German General Staff should be abolished. It was never disbanded.
*Violations of the Versailles Treaty began, in fact, a week before it was signed.
Click here to read an additional article concerning the Versailles Treaty violations.
The British reign over Palestine lasted 31 years; attached is an eyewitness account of the orderly withdrawal that took place during the summer of 1948, when the remaining elements of their colonial regiments lowered the Union Jack for the last time and boarded ships for home:
Last week, from gently-heaving transports in Haifa harbor, men of Britain’s 40th Royal Marines in khaki shorts and green berets, took a last look shoreward. Alongside the transports were the aircraft carrier H.M.S. TRIUMPH, a cruiser and five destroyers… From shore came note by note the sound of a bugler blowing Last Post.
Six months after the United States entered the First World War all sorts of issues had to be addressed, such as the matter of the Sam Brown belt. Since 1914 the famous sword belt had been established as an emblem of authority among all the Allied armies along the assorted fronts, but the Americans didn’t like it one bit. The level-headed editors of Collier’s Magazine published the attached editorial pointing out that such matters of military fashion simply don’t matter at a time of national emergency and to illustrate their point they quoted a portion from Under Fire by Henri Barbusse which laid plain how miserable everyone (without exception) looks in the trenches, regardless of their accessories.
Americans on December 5 [1943] will look backwards to a dramatic night 10 years ago – many will be surprised that a whole decade has passed since the nation abandoned Prohibition… In the early ’30s, Congressman LaGuardia found authorities siphoning an estimated million dollars a day in graft from bootleggers. Cost of the ‘Noble Experiment’ to the government hovered around a billion dollars a year. In the last 14 Prohibition years, the public was figured to have spent more than $36,000,000,000 for bootlegging and smuggled liquor!
When the writer and editor Montrose J. Moses (1878 – 1934) got some quality time with the fifty-four year old poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) they discussed Irish theater, contemporary poetry, the collective literary merits of their generation and a good deal more. Unlike their visits in earlier days, Yeats was by then a respected icon in the republic of letters (having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature a year earlier).
The attached article is composed of numerous newspaper observations that appeared in print throughout April of 1933; these perceptions all pertain to the goings on that followed in the joyous wake of Prohibition’s demise:
‘The return of beer has really been a remarkable phenomenon,’ says The New York Evening Post.
‘Not one of the bad effects predicted for it actually took place’.
Attached is a five page interview with the always demure and introverted pianist Liberace (b. Wladziu Valentino Liberace: 1919 – 1987). When this article first appeared on the pages of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE, no living performer was selling more records than he was, his television program was nearing its second year and American women had not yet figured out that he was gay. Life was good.
From Amazon: Liberace: An American Boy
A new day dawned in Manhattan real estate history at the end of 1961 when the city elders agreed to abandon their bureaucratic jihad (a fire code issue) to evict artists from all those assorted run-down ateliers located around lower Broadway.
These were the upper floors of hundreds of old downtown business and manufacturing buildings (most over a century old) that were characterized by their heavy masonry proliferating with faux loggias, balustrades, entablatures and rows of delicately fluted columns – all scattered throughout Tribeca, SoHo and Chelsea. The artists called them Lofts.
As far as we can figure out, this was the first time in history that anybody seemed to care where an artist lived and worked.
A short column filed by an eye-witness in Manila who described well the profound sense of melancholy that descended upon the W.W. II Japanese prisoners of war when they had learned of the Japanese surrender.
Click here if you would like to read an article about the Japanese surrender proceedings in Tokyo Bay.
Click here to read more articles about the liberation of Paris in 1944.
We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.
Those were the words of General Douglas MacArthur when he opened the Japanese Surrender Proceedings on board the deck of the American battleship, U.S.S. Missouri on the morning of September 2, 1945. This report was filed by Yank correspondent Dale Kramer
Click here if you would like to read about the atomic blast over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.
Click here to read about August 28, 1945 – the day the American occupation began.
