One Woman’s Disenchantment with Feminism
(Review of Reviews, 1910)
The attached eleven paragraph magazine article clearly illustrated what the writer found so objectionable about the 1910 suffrage movement.
Samuel Goldwyn, Producer
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)
Screen scribe Sidney Carroll put to paper a serious column about the productive life of Samuel Goldwyn (1879 – 1974) and all that he had accomplished since he co-founded Hollywood (along with Cecil B. De Mille) in 1913:
He has done many remarkable things in 30 years. He has made as many stars as any man in the business; he was the first to make feature-length films; he was the first to bring the great writers to Hollywood… Goldwyn is the greatest maker of motion pictures ever to come out of Hollywood [with the exception of The Goldwyn Follies (1938)].
A Cartoonist with the U.S. Army in Germany
(Vanity Fair, 1919)
A few cartoons by the illustrator George Wright (1872 – 1951) depicting the American Third Army during it’s 1919 occupation of Germany.
Tales of the Mounted German Corpse
(New York Times, 1915)
A ghastly story from a 1914 front is told in this letter written by British trooper S. Cargill as he recalled a skirmish between German Lancers and British cavalry.
Britain’s King Welcomes the Doughboys
(April, 1918)
A colored scan of the widely distributed seventy-word letter that Britain’s King George V wrote to all members of the American military who had stepped on British soil. The letter is dated April, 1918 and was made to appear as though it was from the King’s private stationery; the Windsor Castle letterhead is engraved in scarlet while the cursive body of the letter (in dark gray ink) is beautifully printed below in the conventional manner. It would seem that the California Doughboy who received this particular letter was not impressed; he simply turned it over and addressed a letter to his parents.
The Paris Purses for Autumn
(Vogue Magazine, 1919)
A VOGUE editorial from the Fall of 1919 praising the swank of six nifty Parisienne purses -each created from different materials and each displaying the industrious fingers of skilled craftsmen.
Click here to read about happy Hollywood’s discovery of plastic surgery…
The Rosettis
(Vanity Fair, 1919)
Shortly after the death of William Michael Rossetti
(1829 – 1919), Welsh poet and essayist Arthur Symons
(1865 – 1945) wrote this essay remembering the man, his brother (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the friendship that the two shared with poets George Meredith and Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Camouflage: An Invention from Ancient Warfare
(The Nation, 1918)
One of the most curious aspects of the Great War that generated a good deal of conversation among the civilian populations was camouflage. Many people believed that camouflage was one of many elements that made that war so terribly different from all other wars. One well-read reader from a respectable American magazine would have non of it: she composed a well researched letter explaining that the need for camouflage preceded the era of industrial warfare and was practiced by the ancient combatants of Greece and Rome as well.
Charles Huard: War Artist in the 1914 Trenches
(Vanity Fair, 1915)
Seven sketches from Soissons by the war artist Charles Huard (1875 – 1965) as they first appeared in a fashionable American society magazine.
Click here to read additional article about the World War I artists.
The Aggressive
(U.S. Army Study, 1919)
An assortment of opinions gleaned from various interviews with German soldiers who all made remarks about the naked aggressiveness shared by the A.E.F.:
The French would not advance unless sure of gaining their objectives while the American infantry would dash in regardless of all obstacles and that while they gained their objectives they would often do so with heavy loss of life.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Reconsidered
(Literary Digest, 1917)
The 1917 publication of The life of Algernon Charles Swinburne
A bombshell that struck literary England a little past that last mid-century has been re-echoing in the recently published ‘Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne’ by Edmund Gosse. The shell was the volume called ‘Poems and Ballads’ a cursory knowledge of which probably places it in many minds as one of the bad books of literature…
E-Learning in the Fifties
(Pageant Magazine, 1958)
This article from the late Fifties refers to the educational benefits that existed in the form of tape recordings, television, films and slide shows and what a glorious discovery it was that they came along when they did to aid in the teacher shortages of the time. Today we have decades of studies that show what among these tools has been useful and what has failed.
In the 1940s Color TV was Anticipated as a Tool with Which Art Students Could Learn…
The Well Dressed Man in Winter
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)
Illustrations of fashion’s offering from the Fall of 1921: great coats, semi-great coats, overcoats and ulsters; raglan and otherwise.
Chez Poiret: the Hot Social Ticket in the Paris of 1919
(Vogue Magazine, 1919)
The post-war publicity machine of French fashion designer Paul Poiret was in fine form when he saw to it that his minions invited the Paris-based correspondent from American VOGUE to his house for a grand fete, seated her comfortably, drink in hand, right on the fifty-yard line in order that she might be better able to report to her handlers back in New York that Paris was back.
The correspondent who was not invited was the fashion journalist from FLAPPER MAGAZINE; American flappers did not approve of Poiret one bit. Click here to read what they thought of him.
The Duke of Windsor Influences
(Men’s Wear, 1950)
MEN’S WEAR MAGAZINE printed a few paragraphs on the heavy hand that the Duke of Windsor had in the world of manly attire:
No one completely personified English qualities in attire than the Prince of Wales…Whatever he chose to wear was considered correct and in good taste and was accepted by millions of others in America and elsewhere. Following are a few of the styles that can be traced right back to the Duke of Windsor, either because he wore them first or was responsible for their spread…
-they include such fashion innovations as the Panama hat, the spread collar and brown buckskin shoes among others.
More articles about the Duke of Windsor can be found on these pages.
The Business End of Gas Warfare
(Literary Digest, 1917)
The attached article, How Well Our Chemical Industry Has Been Mobilized for War is an abstract from a 1917 issue of THE JOURNAL OF COMMERCE which discussed how readily American chemists embraced their roll after the United States committed itself to the war.
There is much talk of the procurement of potash, toluol and trinitrotoluol which were necessary elements in the manufacture of gas.
The Fields: A Wacky Family of Spies and All Their Pals
(People Today Magazine, 1950)
“A Red curse hangs over the Field family. One by one, the Soviet secret police, the terrible NKVD, has been
Russian Modernism After the Revolution
(Vanity Fair, 1919)
Art alone survives the earthquake shocks of revolution, and Russian art has been doubly secure because of it’s deep-rooted imagination and it’s passionate sincerity.
That was the word from Oliver M. Sayler writing from Moscow as it starved during the Summer of 1919. Sayler, known primarily for his writings on Russian theater from this period, wrote enthusiastically about the Russian Suprematist Casimir Malyevitch, Futurist David Burliuk and The Jack of Diamonds Group; believing deeply in the Russian Revolution, he wrote not a word about how the Soviets mistreated the modern artists of Russia.