One of the first reviews of F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned
(1922). The reviewer was impressed:
The Beautiful and the Damned is a real story, but a story greatly damaged by wit.
As early as 1922, the British Foreign Office could recognize the economic promise of Israel. This article sums up a report on British Palestine submitted to the British Government by High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel concerning the Jewish population growth to the region, as well as the establishment of schools and businesses.
It is especially interesting as reflecting the development of Palestine as the future home of the Jewish race. The High Commissioner points out that the country, if properly developed, ought to experience a future far more prosperous than it enjoyed before the war.
Here is a profile of a very young Al Hirschfeld (1903 – 2003) – long-time NY Times caricaturist.
The design and general scheme of a small dugout which can be made by the infantry under the supervision of an officer, without the aid of an engineer, are here given.
Click here to read an article about life in a W.W. I German listening post…
Click here to see a 1915 ad for British Army military camp furniture.
Samuel Rosenman (1896 – 1973) was an attorney, judge and a highly placed insider within the ranks of the Democratic Party, both in Albany and the nation’s capital. It was Rosenman who helped articulated many of FDR’s policies, wrote numerous executive orders and conceived of the moniker New Deal. He was the first lawyer to hold the position White House Counsel and he was an indispensable advisor to Roosevelt throughout the course of his New York governorship as well as his presidency.
Here is the skinny on the Bananas and Skim Milk Diet – also known as the Magic 888 – still in use today, the reducing plan is a crash diet designed to remove five pounds within three to four days.
During the Summer of 1943, James F. Byrenes, FDR’s Director of the Office of Economic Stabilization, gave a report on the wartime production output for that period. 1943 proved to have been a turning point for the Allied war efforts on both fronts.
Young mother Hollywood has had another baby… a child some day destined to take its place in the playpen and howl the living pants off the rest of the brood – movies, radio, music, big theater, little theater, dance and festival. How soon television becomes the fair-haired boy of the village depends upon a number of manufacturing and economic factors…
Read another article about this Westward expansion…
Here is a moving account of the meteoric rise of Johnny Mathis (b. 1935) – from an impoverished child of the San Francisco slums to the last of the great-American crooners.
Johnny Mathis is just 23 years old , though he appears a hungry , vulnerable 17. When he sings a romantic ballad in high falsetto, his large eyes gaze out over the heads of the audience as if in search of someone.
A 1938 article covering the ascent of Reichfurhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler (1900 – 1945):
Himmler has dossiers on every man of substance in Germany. Nazi party functionary, business leader, churchman, diplomat, army officer or statesman; all are nicely indexed for the day when their case histories might be needed in a hurry. Because in Germany, everyone is suspect. Some Nazis will even tell you that Himmler has a dossier on himself.
Click here to read an eyewitness account of the suicide of Himmler.
Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler.
A day by day account by Private George Groh, a member of the 101st Airborne, who joined the 1944 Normandy Invasion as a glider-infantryman.
With daring and resourcefulness Father Benoit built up an efficient organization to smuggle Jews and other anti-Nazi refugees into Spain…He found an old hand press in the basement and, with the aid of a Jewish printer-engraver, turned out thousands of passports. Then he summoned a number of Swiss, Hungarian and Rumanian consuls and convinced them in the name of God and our common humanity to sign the crudely made documents.
We were surprised to learn that even in this multicultural era of unenforced immigration laws – the last name Smith still stands as the most common surname in the United States – and as of 2021 there are 2,627,141 people with this last name living today. This article points out that there is always at any given time a Smith serving in Congress (currently that duty falls on the shoulders of Representative Chris Smith, who hails from the 4th District of New Jersey).
This article is about the chemist Dr. Leo Hendrik Baekeland (1863 – 1944) – who left the world a far more plastic place than when he had found it.
When watching the old newsreel footage from the two world wars you see a fair amount of American sailors going about their business. They wore a uniform that seemed to have its origins in the Nineteenth Century, with bell bottom trousers and an odd shirt called a jumper. The blue jumper of an American sailor is decorated with various white stripes, stars and topped off with a queer little black silk kerchief; this article seeks to explain what the origins behind them all were largely British.
When this two page profile appeared in print Pickford was world famous, married to the handsomest actor in Hollywood, adored by all – she could do no wrong. Just fourteen years later, the respected New York playwright Clara Boothe Brokaw would ridicule her in the pages of Vanity Fair (August, 1932: p. 18) as a sad symbol representing a vulgar era.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, today few people know who she was – although she does get twice as many Google searches than Lillian Gish (but whose counting).
Amazon offers a PBS salute to the actress on a DVD that is strangely titled Mary Pickford
Will fascism come in the wake of the New Deal? The writer surveys its rapid post-war spread through Europe, reviews its origins in the writings of Pareto and Sorel and indicates steps that lead to its establishment.
An article about FDR’s Alphabet Agencies can be read here…
An article that refutes the argument as to whether FDR was a fascist can be read here…
