More Letters from the German Home Front
“The information in letters found on the German dead, intimate and personal as it is, leads to some striking deductions. […]
America Magazine
Articles from America Magazine
The Birth of Hollywood Filmmaking
(America, 1932)
2013 Anno Domini marked the 100th anniversary of the Hollywood film industry. With this in mind it is entirely fitting and proper that we post this thumbnail history that outlines how it all got rolling, as told by the jaded Robert Sherwood, an early film critic who witnessed much of it (although he incorrectly dated the first Hollywood feature film to 1912).
Hollywood history begins with four men: Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, Dustin Farnum and a silent film called The Squaw Man…
(The fourth name in Sherwood’s list was that of Samuel Goldwyn – who, in fact, had nothing to do with the production, but whose name in Hollywood had such staying power it seemed difficult to imagine that he didn’t.)
Read a 1951 profile of a future First Lady: the young Nancy Reagan.
The New York Social Register
(America, 1932)
Who could write an accurate assessment of social New York better than a celebrated Broadway playwright? Exactly; that is why we were so happy to find this essay by Clare Boothe Luce (1903 – 1987) on just that very topic:
The New York Social Register for 1931 contained about thirty-five thousand names, an increase of fifteen thousand over the Social Register of 1914; and the fourteen social registers of the largest American cities contained more than one hundred thousand names – an increase of over fifty thousand names during the same length of time.
These figures are particularly remarkable when one considers that the social register of exactly one hundred years ago, Longworth’s New York Directory, boasted exactly eighteen names.
From Amazon: Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce
Korean Unification Commission Breaks Up
(America Magazine, 1947)
The Truman Doctrine for Greece and Turkey may soon have to be applied to South Korea, if the Soviets continue to sabotage the Moscow Agreement as they have done in the past.
The Soviet Army moved into northern Korea during the August of 1945, click here to read about it…
Soviet Slave Labor Camps
(Pathfinder & America Magazines, 1947)
Although the true horrors of Stalin’s Russia would not be known until his death in 1953 (and then again with the opening of the Soviet Archives in 1990), bits and pieces were coming to the light as thousands of refugees and defectors swarmed the government offices of the Western Powers in search of asylum following the end of the Second World War. These small report from 1949 and 1947 let it be known how long the Soviet labor camps (Gulags) had been operational (since 1918), who was in them, how many different types of camps existed (there were three different varieties). As to the question concerning how many inmates were interred, there was no decisive count, somewhere between 14,000,000 to 20,000,000.
Since they came into being, the Soviet [forced labor] camps have swallowed more people, have exacted more victims, than all other camps – Hitler’s and others- together, and this lethal engine continues to operate full-blast…
A Fiscal Report on the Immigrants of 1911
(America Magazine, 1912)
This is a short notice concerning which of the prominent immigrant groups were the poorest and the richest in the year 1911 – and from which nations did they originate.
Of the arrivals during the fiscal year, 1.6 percent were debarred from entering this country. Special mention is made of the fact that immigrants from Canada carried the greatest amount per capita, and those crossing the Mexican border brought with them the least money.
American Society and Near Society
(America, 1932)
Clever writer and charming socialite, Clare Boothe Luce (1903 – 1987) succinctly summed-up the good and the bad that could be found at the highest levels of social America in the Thirties…