Keep it short: that was the M.O. of the hairdressers of the Fifties (as you, no doubt, gathered from this 1949 article) – and this column, accompanied by eight photos, serves as proof. Much of this column pertains to the men who were active in 1952 hair dressing, and their deep thoughts pertaining to pny tails, perms and poodle-cuts.
Click here to read about the short hair craze of the late Forties.
Three years before the total French withdrawal from Vietnam, this one Frenchman summed up his comrade’s frustrations concerning their battles against the Viet Minh:
We can’t win a guerrilla war unless we have the support of the people. Frankly, we have not got it. Hitler or the Russians could conquer this country in two months with mass executions, wholesale reprisals and concentration camps. To fight this war and remain humanitarian is difficult.
Italy, Germany and Russia, leading exponents of Europe’s Fascist and Communist camps, have each asked for more prolific mothers and decreed measures designed to fetch in the bambini, kinder and kodomos. Their dictator’s desires for more babies and still more babies have developed into a population race.
Click here to read about the Nazi struggle to increase their birthrate…
ARBEITER ZEITUNG, a Viennese newspaper, quoted the following swelled with hubris recalling his flight over crushed French Village in the Verdun sector:
I felt like a king, loaded with my bombs… I flew over Saint Privat quite low, so that I could see all the houses, and if I dropped my bombs there, I should have been able to to destroy half the village…
Seven years must have seemed an appropriate amount of time to withhold information concerning the generally unpleasant character traits that were apparent in First Lady Jackie Kennedy – and so in 1970 Washington writers Lucianne Goldberg and Fred Sparks put pen to paper and recalled all the minutiae they could piece together regarding Her Elegance:
Jackie was master of deception. In the White House, she never wore her double-breasted mink coat when she could be photographed. But after her husband died, and she moved to New York, she wore the mink, as one fashion writer put it, ‘to do errands around Manhattan’.
This article appears on this site with the permission of Lucianne Goldberg
Popcorn was introduced as a snack food to American movie-goers as a result of the candy shortages during the earliest years of the Second World War.
Attached is a petite notice documenting the fact that the substitute was a wise one:
By 1952, movie houses accounted for about one-third of the nation’s annual $350 million retail popcorn sales.
Reference is also made to the efforts that were made to secure noiseless popcorn bags.
If popcorn replaced sweets on the home front, what replaced steak?
Two and a half years were left on the clock for the exiled Leon Trotsky (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein: 1879 – 1940) until he would have to keep his rendezvous with an icepick in Mexico – and while living it up on this borrowed time he granted an interview to this one correspondent from a Beverly Hills literary magazine in which he ranted on in that highly-dated and terribly awkward Bolsheviki language about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his social programs.
Click here to read an article about the NKVD agent who murdered Trotsky.
A black and white diagram depicting the breach of the 1903 Springfield rifle
Throughout the course of the war the U.S. Army was paying $19.50 for each rifle.
A five paragraph account regarding the royal families of Europe; how close they were prior to the war and the important roll played by Queen Victoria in maintaining the strong bond between them. One particular line of note:
Queen Victoria was the only human being whom the Kaiser feared.
Click here to read another article about the war and the royal families.
Conscription and Conscience
Attached is an article about the Charlie Chaplin film, Monsieur Verdux (1947) and the monstrous beast Henri Landru -the French murderer on whom the story is loosely based. This article was written by Gordon Kahn, remembered chiefly in our own time as one of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters of the post-World War II period. Not too long after this article was written he went into self-exile in Mexico.
Before there was an HSN or a QVC – before there was an Adam Freeman or a Mary Beth Roe, there was Your Television Shopper and Leave It To The Girls starring Maggie Johnson and Faye Emerson, respectively. The programs were two of several such shows that aired during the prepubescent days of television broadcasting – and like the shopping shows that came along fifty years later, they, too, moved products off the shelves at a surprising pace.
Click here to read how Hollywood costume designer affected popular fashion…
In the early Fifties many of the people from the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico decided to pack their bags and move to New York City. Overnight, it seemed, a portion of Harlem came to be known as Spanish Harlem – where hastily assembled mambo dance halls could be found among restaurants serving the exotic cuisine of the Caribbean. There were also complications that emerged with the new comers that are addressed in this 1955 article:
Today, however, there is a forceful change taking place, an influence so great that New York City officials have forecast a startling racial shift within a few years and are already making plans for meeting this switch…
Attached is a printable chronology of important events that took place four months prior to the American Civil War.
December, 1860, was a busy month for Secessionists, with all sorts of gatherings, hand shaking and back-slapping; while in Washington the elected representatives to the U.S. Congress from the state of South Carolina resigned.
In North Carolina, U.S. Army Major Robert Anderson (1805 – 1871) gets a sense of what is coming down the pike and removes his troops from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter.
The United States has always viewed the other American countries…with an invincible disdain – a disdain that could not remain a secret to the Young Latins, since it cannot be readily concealed; or, to speak more exactly it has never regarded the nations of Spanish and Portuguese origin as really it’s equal.
George Jean Nathan (1882 – 1958) and H.L. Mencken 
-Read an Article About the First World War and the Gratitude of France-
British thinker Bertrand Russell (1872-1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) used to get mighty hot under the collar when the topic of 1922 American society came up and this report is just one example. On a speaking tour in the United States, the Cambridge Professor opined that
love of truth [is] obscured in America by commercialism of which pragmatism is the philosophical expression; and love of our neighbor kept in fetters by Puritan morality.
He would have none of the thinking that America’s main concern for jumping into the meat grinder of 1914-1918 was entirely inspired by wounded France and poor little Belgium but was rather an exercise in American self-interest.
A short paragraph about the M-Dogs of the American Army during the Second World War and how they were trained to locate both plastic and metallic mines during the course of the war.
An additional paragraph can be read about the Hollywood starlet who volunteered her dog for military service, only to be informed that the pooch had given the last full measure on behalf of democracy and a grateful nation.
Click here to read an article about re-educating the captured German boys of the war.
