Printed posthumously, the attached article was written by British Lieutenant Colonel Charles A Court Repington (1858 – 1925) as he recalled his conversations with French Field Marshals Ferdinand Foch (1851-1929), Joseph Joffre (1852 – 1931) and a number of other French statesmen about the First World War during a series of chats that took place in the autumn 1924.
Although the author of this article, educator Cedric Fowler, does not offer a name for the subject he is proposing, it will not take you very long to recognize it as social studies. Fowler argued that the text books available at that time were more suited to the Nineteenth Century than the tumultuous Thirties, ignoring all the various hot topics of the day that would have made subjects such as history, geography and civics come alive for those students who were enrolled at the time of the Great Depression.
Life has become more complex for young Americans since the time of their fathers and grandfathers, and educational method has become more complex and more comprehensive with it… The work of Dewey, Thorndike and a score of other authorities has liberated the schoolroom from its stuffy atmosphere, has made it possible for it to become an ante-room to adult life.
This letter is very short and was composed by a German soldier who is simply identified as a socialist. Writing to his wife from the war-torn Eastern European front in Moldavia, he describes what the man-made Hell of industrial war was like – the gas shells, the grenades, the ceaseless rattle of machine guns and the never ending groans of the wounded. The soldier concludes that if only the kings who were responsible for the war could witness this carnage for only fifteen minutes, then surely the war would end.
Click here to read about the foreign-born soldiers who served in the American Army of the First World War.
American audiences came to know Audrey Hepburn (1929 – 1993) when she was teamed up with Gregory Peck for the 1953 William Wyler production Roman Holiday (Paramount) – but the king makers of Hollywood sat up and took notice of her a year earlier, when she appeared in the European comedy Monte Carlo Baby (briefly reviewed herein). This movie was pretty quickly forgotten – and today Monte Carlo Baby cannot be found on DVD or cassette, and the film’s producer, Ray Ventura (1908 – 1979), is primarily remembered for his talents as a jazz pianist.
The editors of STAGE MAGAZINE were dumbfounded when they considered that just ten years after audiences got an earful from the first sound movies, the most consistent characteristic to have been maintained throughout that decade was the box-office dominance of American movie stars, directors and writers. After naming the most prominent of 1930s U.S. movie stars the author declares with certainty that this could not have been an accident.
Published ten months after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, Vice-Admiral Ross T. McIntire, Surgeon General of the U.S. Navy, reminisced about Roosevelt’s illness and his observations of the man:
The Pearl Harbor attack put a pressure on the President that never lifted.
With the flower of American youth fighting and dying on land and sea, he looked on any sparing of himself as a betrayal…
From Amazon:
Attached is a glowing review that praises the dramatic talents of a seven-year-old boy: Allen Clayton Hoskins (aka, Farina) – one of the few African-Americans to have been chosen to perform in the ensemble cast that made up the Our Gang comedies.
One of the most gifted thespians in the silent drama is Farina, the negro child actor whose facile expression has created no end of comment… Placed in the midst of a group of children, all of whom have been tutored over a period of several years in the intricacies of and politics of photoplay acting, Farina has created a high standard of achievement… this troupin’ Nubian has given the others of the gang plenty to aim at in the form of a thespic target.
A profile of the former First Lady following the conclusion of her first year outside of the White House.
She mourns with dignity. And if there are tears, they may
fall only in the dead of night.
CLICK HERE… to read the obituary of President Kennedy.
Excerpts from the diary of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 – 1902) on the matter of the 1850s Women’s Suffrage Movement, Bloomers and the public reaction to that queer attire…
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a member of the Unitarian religion…
An essay by one of the founders of Dada, Tristan Tzara (Sami Rosenstock a.k.a. Samuel Rosenstock; 1896 – 1963), who eloquently explains the origins of the movement:
Dadaism is a characteristic symptom of the disordered modern world…
Although the true horrors of Stalin’s Russia would not be known until his death in 1953 (and then again with the opening of the Soviet Archives in 1990), bits and pieces were coming to the light as thousands of refugees and defectors swarmed the government offices of the Western Powers in search of asylum following the end of the Second World War. These small report from 1949 and 1947 let it be known how long the Soviet labor camps (Gulags) had been operational (since 1918), who was in them, how many different types of camps existed (there were three different varieties). As to the question concerning how many inmates were interred, there was no decisive count, somewhere between 14,000,000 to 20,000,000.
Since they came into being, the Soviet [forced labor] camps have swallowed more people, have exacted more victims, than all other camps – Hitler’s and others- together, and this lethal engine continues to operate full-blast…
Together [these entertainers] constitute the vast composite known as USO-Camp Shows, Inc. Organized in November, 1941 as this war’s answer to the last one’s mistakes (too little which came too late to too few), Camp Shows see to it that as much entertainment as possible reaches as many soldiers as possible – in contrast to the fact that the last war produced only an Elsie Janis (You can read about her here)… The money to run Camp Shows comes from the National War Fund; the authority to use its services rests with the Army and Navy.
The General had seen welcomes in Paris and London and Washington and New York, but he got the warmest reception of all when he hit his boyhood home town, little Abilene, Kansas.
As soon as the Eisenhower party was seated a gun boomed and the parade began. It wasn’t a military parade. It told the story of a barefoot boy’s rise from fishing jaunts on nearby Mud Creek to command of the Allied expeditionary force that defeated Fascism in Western Europe.
In 1944, a class of sixth graders wrote General Eisenhower and asked him how they can help in the war effort; click here to read his response…
A four page article regarding the city of Brooklyn, New York during the Second World War – make no mistake about it: this is the Brooklyn that Senator Bernie Sanders inherited – it isn’t far from the N.Y. borough named Queens, where numerous Communists resided.
• Almost half the penicillin that was produced in the United States came out of Brooklyn
• Forty Five percent of of the Brooklyn war plants were awarded the Army and Navy E or the M from the Maritime Services
• Throughout the war, the ranks of the U.S. Armed Services were swollen with Brooklyn sons and daughters, 280,000 strong.
Click here to read an article about one of New York’s greatest mayors: Fiorello LaGuardia.
Literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895 – 1972) was a big part of the intellectual world that existed in New York throughout much of the Twenties through the Fifties. His reviews could be found in a number of magazines such as VANITY FAIR, THE DIAL and THE NEW REPUBLIC. Wilson is remembered for championing many of the younger poets that we still read to this day and in this review, Bunny Wilson celebrated the new poetic form that the modern era had created: free verse. Good words can be read on behalf of the poetry of Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell.
At the end of the First World War, the young women of France were asked the question:
Who would you choose for a husband, a Frenchman or an American? And what are the qualities and faults which justify your preference?
Some of the answers were pretty funny (especially the responses made by the irate Frenchmen returning from the Front). After all the votes were tallied, it was discovered that, regardless of their gold teeth, big tortoise shell glasses and shaved faces, the Doughboys were able to charm as much as a quarter of the women asked (which was a good deal better than they thought they would do) Some women, however, were not very impressed.
Click here to read an article about social diseases within the A.E.F..
Click here if would like to read about British Women and American G.I.s during the Second World War…
When this article went to press in 1960, Jane Fonda (b. 1937) was all of 22.
She had recently dropped out of Vassar to pursue modeling in Manhattan (unlike most college drop-out who quit campus to pursue modeling, Fonda’s smiling mug was placed on two VOGUE covers that year) and to study method acting with Lee Strasberg (1901 – 1982). She had her first taste of Broadway in a short-lived production titled There was a Little Girl and had not, as yet, taken up her interest in totalitarian communism.
Click here to read about Henry Fonda.
Attached is a eye-witness account of the Los Angeles Issie and Nisei populations after having been removed from their homes and detained at Santa Anita racetrack prior to their transfer and subsequent incarceration at Manzanar, California.
There are more than 6,000 Japanese housed in the stables which once accommodated 2,000 horses…Each stall has had a room built on in front with doors and windows and the floors have been covered with a layer of asphaltum which seems to have killed the odors.
This article, laced throughout with subtle undertones of condemnation, was written by a Hollywood screenwriter named Alfred Cohn (1880 – 1951) who is largely remembered today for having written the adaptation for the Al Jolson movie The Jazz Singer (1929).
