A French photograph showing the entry to one of the many subterranean shelters that dotted the Western front during the First World War – also included is a diagram of what one of the smaller German dugouts with a similar entry-way.
This article appears on this site by way of a special agreement with L’Illustration.
Click here to see a 1915 ad for British Army military camp furniture.
When the flaks had all said their bit and the Japanese and Germans had all signed on the dotted line, YANK MAGAZINE did what everybody else was doing – they demobilized. When YANK published their last issue numerous magazine and newspaper editors were pretty choked-up about it and they wrote columns about how sad they all were to see it go; this one appeared in another U.S. Army rag.
More on this magazine can be read HERE…
Read about the time when THE STARS & STRIPES ceased printing…
PATHFINDER MAGAZINE was a pretty terrific news organ and to thumb through any of the issues spanning 1910 through 1922 you’ll get the sense that it had a heavy hand in influencing TIME, NEWSWEEK and any number of other magazines that came later. Established in Washington, D.C. in 1894, PATHFINDER earned its reputation as a genuine source for domestic and international news.
This article was written by its last publisher, Graham Patterson, and it served as both a history of that weekly as well as an obituary for its founder, George Mitchell – which is entirely fitting because the whole enterprise folded four and half years later. By the time its final issue rolled off the press in 1952 it had become the second largest news magazine in America – with a circulation numbering 1,200,000. With a record like that it seems odd that it went under at all.
Click here to read our collection of articles from PATHFINDER MAGAZINE.
The Battle of the Ardennes was practically over. The salient which once poked 52 miles into Belgium from the German frontier had been ground down to a nub by last week…. The German retreated slowly and in good order. In the sleet and fog of the Ardennes they pulled back their armor and other vehicles while their artillery and infantrymen put up stiff rearguard actions.
These two 1932 magazine advertisements had a tremendous amount of relevance in the lives of those fellows lucky enough to still enjoy summer vacations, just two and a half years into the greatest economic down-turn in American history.
These two pages appeared in the swankiest of New York society rags during the era: STAGE, TOWN & COUNTRY and VANITY FAIR, promoting the white summer suits and linen leisurewear of the Palm Beachtailors.
When this article was published the war was over and Paris had experienced her second German-free autumn – but life was still difficult in the city. Coal was still rationed, the lines in the shops were long and the average French child was drastically underweight. NEWSWEEK dispatched two gumshoe reporters to get the full picture for the folks at home (where, happily, rationing had ended the the previous August).
Attached is a four page article that reported on the deserters of the U.S. Army who organized themselves into Chicago-style gangs in post-occupied Paris, replete with gun-molls, hideouts, fencing contacts and all the trimmings of a third-rate-blood-and-thunder detective story.
After years of material shortage, the accent is definitely on the feminine, with all of its flounces… A look at all the collections shows that black is the outstanding color for afternoon and dinner. Drapings, wrappings and swathings that girdle the hips are the outstanding line. The favored fabrics are velvet , velveteen, corduroy (used horizontally, as are other striped materials) monotone tweeds, Kashas (a twill-weave fabric of wool mixed with Cashmere), and some Scotch plaids.
Day and night U.S. Psychological Warfare soldiers in Korea risk their lives to talk and write Communists into submission. Their first leaflets hit the Reds just 36 hours after they first crossed the 38th Parallel. Today Pentagon brass praises ‘Psywar’ for influencing 70,000 North Koreans and Chinese Communists to surrender.
A wife, having suffered her husband’s stench long enough, had the police drag him away to stand before the local magistrate where, she hoped, some swift, punitive measure would be delivered and placate not only herself, but the long-suffering tax-payers as well. The husband agreed to bathe.
Attached is the 1932 review of Woman: Theme and Variations by Major A. Corbett-Smith:
There is no mystery about women, he announces…she is never quite sure of herself in comparison with other women; but she is well aware of her superiority to man…
Click here to read about feminine conversations overheard in the best New York nightclubs of 1937.
Having no foresight as to the fashion juggernaut that would commence in one year with the appearance of Christian Dior’s New Look, the journalist puts all her credibility in one basket by declaring that all eyes are on the French fashion designer Madame Marcelle Dormoy. Much ink is spilled concerning the bleakness that clouded fashionable Paris during the occupation and the difficulty all fashion houses experienced in 1946 securing suitable fabric for their creations (at black-market prices).
The writer recovered some of her street-cred anticipating the meteoric career return of the well-loved French film actress Edwige Feuillère (1907 – 1998), who is personified herein as the epitome of French Glamour returned.
Click here to read a 1946 article about Le Corbusier.
A 1939 article that concerned the rapid growth of the German Air Force, but also referred to the scandalous business dealings of American manufacturers Boeing and Douglas Aircraft had in this expansion.
It has taken Field Marshall Hermann Wilhelm Goering a little over six years to build the German Air Armada, one of the world’s most formidable offensive forces, out of a magnificent bluff.
A similar article can be read here…
It was no secret around Washington that President Franklin Roosevelt was partial to the U.S. Navy. The admirals and other senior officers of the navy certainly knew – and loved it. The attached essay was an appreciative salute to FDR composed shortly after his death by Admiral William Pratt (1869 – 1957):
Other men, military in training and veterans of successful land campaigns, have sat in the White House, but never before in the history of our country has any man ever sat there whose instincts at heart were essentially those of a sailor.
Here is a 1937 magazine article from the long forgotten pages of DELINEATOR MAGAZINE insisted that they found the very first fashion stylist -some lass named Tobé (born Taubé Coller, a.k.a. Mrs Herbert Davis, 1890 – 1962). They were very insistent on the matter, although they failed to explain the sources used to reach this conclusion:
This woman is the first official stylist…Now she is head of Tobé Incorporated, through which she does for more than a hundred stores in America and some in Canada, England, Australia, Norway and Sweden.
Written two years prior to the Korean War, this article is about the joint occupation of Korea – the Soviets in the industrialized North, the Americans in the agrarian South, and how poorly both regions were being served before the 1950 war:
The issue in Korea is not Communism vs. Americanism, but occupation-trusteeship vs. freedom. On that issue, both Russia and the United States would lose after a free vote of the people, because the two powers have, each in their own way, failed Korea.
The Soviet Army moved into northern Korea during the August of 1945, click here to read about it…
This column by Andrés Iduarte (1907 – 1984) addressed the popularity of Los Indios in the arts of Latin America throughout the 1930s. What came to be known as the pro-Indian movement in the U.S. of the 1960s was a political development in the counter-culture of that era, but thirty years earlier it was a trend in the arts of Latin America. Andrés Iduarte covered the contributions of painters, poets, novelists and sculptors who were all of Native descent south of the Rio Grande (FYI: Brazil is not mentioned in this article).
Land of the Nakoda: The Story of the Assinibone Indians was the brain child of the Montana WPA (Works Progress Administration), Writers Project. The book is a collection of tales as told by the tribe elders and transcribed by one other member for publication in book form and it is still in print today.
