These historic pen portraits were compiled and re-worked for publication some fifty years after the San Francisco Earthquake; together they serve to illustrate the collective, yet individual, acts of suffering and heroics that took place April 18, 1906:
"On the front steps of an abandoned house she had seen a young Chinese mother nursing a baby. The mother's face was besmirched, and drawn with weariness. Her own child slept in swaddling blankets beside her. The child on her breast was white." Here is a 1929 magazine article that makes clear for us in the digital age just how appealing the fad of flag pole sitting was to the YouTube-starved teenagers of the Twenties. This article tells the tale of Avon "Azie" Foreman and Jimmy Jones, two courageous flag pole sitting sons of Baltimore who inspired their feminine Maryland counterparts, Ruth McCruden and Dorthy Staylor, to ascend to perch. This journalist was probably not alone in believing that anyone who was capable of placing their keister where the flag should be was a rare and distinct breed of individual - possessing a faultless character and was destined for great things in the future.
Good; they will need such sturdy souls in two months - when the bottom falls out of the N.Y. Stock Exchange and the Great Depression begins - you can read about that here... Matthew Weiss is a German-English translator specializing in historical texts, bringing old language into the present without sacrificing its sense of heritage and with an emphasis on idiom, colloquialism and immediacy. Areas of translating expertise also include poetry, fiction, Holocaust and war documentation, diaries, theatrical and motion picture scripts, film subtitles, librettos, but also journalism, technical writing and all manner of online content.
Click here to read his translation of a 1914 short story.
Abuses were all too common in most Southern penitentiaries up until the Fifties. This article chronicles one prison in Florida and their practice of placing the prisoners in 60-gallon barrels when they stepped out of line. In 1913 a very strong, anti-Federalist step was taken to amend the Constitution and alter the manner in which U.S. Senators were to be selected and replaced in the event of vacancies. The 17th Amendment was passed: it guaranteed that senators would no longer be elected from within the legislative bodies of the state governments, but would be elected directly by the citizens of their respective states, just as the representatives are. Historian Everett Kimball pointed out in this article how the 17th Amendment altered the very nature of the U.S. Senate.
Generations before satellite photography, and long before the T.V. cameras were placed on the moon, an American astronomer named V.M. Slipher (1875 – 1969) figured out the predominate color of our planet when seen from afar. Read on...
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