The New York Times – Old Magazine Articles

Karl Marx Reviewed
(NY Times, 1887)

To be sure, the book review of Das Kapital by Karl Marx that appeared in The New York Times in 1887 was very different from the review that same paper would give that book today. For this reviewer, Marx was one of the advocates of chaos, and a militant political economist:

If he is anything, Karl Marx is a man in a towering rage. His paragraphs are replete with kicks and cuffs. He wants to slap your face if you are a bourgeois; to smash your skull if you are a capitalist.

Click here to read an article by Leon Trotsky.

CARRY ON by Coningsby Dawson
(NY Times, 1917)

Attached, you will find the 1917 review of Carry On
by Coningsby Dawson (1883 – 1959). The book is a collection of the author’s beautifully crafted letters that were written to his family while he served on the Western Front during the First World War. Dawson’s ability to convey the urgency of the allied cause was so well received he was assigned to write two additional books by the British Ministry of Information: The Glory of the Trenches and Out to Win, both published in 1918 (neither of the two were any where near as moving as the one that is reviewed here).

Click here to read about W.W. I art.

The War Begins
(NY Times, 1861)

The ball has opened. War is inaugurated. The batteries of Sullivan’s Island, Morris Island and other points were opened on Fort Sumpter at 4 ‘oclock this morning… The answer to General Beauregard’s demand by Major Anderson was that he would surrender when his supplies were exhausted, that is, if he was not reinforced.

Here are the dispatches from Charleston that appeared on the front page of the New York Times on April 13, 1861.

‘A Negro Poet”
(NY Times, 1897)

Here is the NY Times review of Lyrics of Lowly Life (1897) by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906), who was a distinguished African-American poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. If Helen had the face that launched a thousand ships, then Dunbar had the poetry to launch at least twenty thousand schools – for it seems that is about how many there are named for him.

The Spirit of Flappers
(NY Times, 1922)

Speaking about why she loved the Twenties, Diana Vreeland (1903 – 1989) – observant fashion editor and unique fashion phenomenon, once remarked on a chat show that there’s never been a woman with her clothes chopped off at the knee in history. Indeed – Vreeland would find the attached article about flappers to be spot-on.

A Woman War Worker Cartoon
(NY Times 1917)

Attached is a cartoon that was created during the third year of the First World War by a British cartoonist who feared that women have, through the years, been loosing their feminine mojo – that charming thing that truly separates them from the males of the species.

‘How We Made the October Revolution”
(New York Times, 1919)

Here is Leon Trotsky’s reminiscence of those heady days in 1917 that served as the first step in a 75 year march that went nowhere in particular and put millions of people in an early grave – this is his recollection of the fall of the Kerensky Government and the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics(R.I.P.).

THE REVOLUTION was born directly from the war, and the war became the touchstone of all the revolutionary parties and energies…

The review of the first English edition of Das Kapital can be read here…

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
(NY Times, 1920)

A remarkable book is this latest by Sinclair Lewis. A novel, yes, but so unusual as not to fall easily into a class. There is practically no plot, yet the book is absorbing. It is so much like life itself, so extraordinarily real. These people are actual folk, and there was never better dialogue written than their revealing talk.

Ulysses by James Joyce
(NY Times, 1922)

Here is the 1922 review of Ulysses by James Joyce as it appeared in the NEW YORK TIMES:

Before proceeding with a brief analysis of Ulysses and comment on its construction and its content, I wish to characterize it. Ulysses is the most important contribution that has been made to fictional literature in the Twentieth Century.

An interview with Joyce can be read here…

How John Jacob Astor Died
(New York Times, 1912)

Two eyewitness accounts relaying the last moments in the life of millionaire investor John Jacob Astor IV (born and his gallantry in refusing a place in the lifeboats. According to Mrs. Churchill Candee (born Helen Churchill Hungerford, 1859 – 1949)and Second Class passenger Hilda Slater (1882 – 1965) he lived up to the expected standards of the day:

I saw Colonel John Jacob Astor hand his young wife into a boat tenderly and then ask an officer whether or not he might also go. When permission was refused he stepped back and coolly took out his cigarette case.
‘Good bye, dearie’ he called gaily, as he lighted his cigarette and leaned over the rail, ‘I’ll join you later.’

Isador Straus
(New York Times, 1912)

The attached obituary of Isador Straus (born 1845) as it appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES the day after the news of his death was made known. At the time he had secured passage on board Titanic, Straus was co-owner of the Macy’s department store with his brother Nathan. A trusted advisor to U.S. President Grover Cleveland, he was elected to represent the New Yorkers of the fifty-third district and served in that post between 1894 and 1895. He died in the company of his wife Ida; unlike Straus, her body was never recovered.

Cowardly Behavior on TITANIC
(New York Times, 1912)

This is a small notice from THE NEW YORK TIMES reporting on the surprisingly impulsive behavior of the men of high civic standing on-board Titanic who were among the first to scramble for the lifeboats:

It was our Congressmen, our Senators, and our ‘big men’ who led in the crush for the lifeboats.

It was also pointed out that many of the Titanic heroes that night were also men of prominence within their communities, fellows such as Isador Straus and John Jacob Astor who refused to accept lifeboat seating.

Brough Called Out for Racial Parity
(New York Times, 1915)

One year prior to being elected as the 25th governor of Arkansas, Charles Hillman Brough (1876 – 1935), while serving as the chairman of the University Commission on the Southern Race Question, submitted his opinion regarding racial segregation in the Annual Report that he had written for that organization. Dr. Brough, who at the time was a professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Arkansas, condemned the Jim Crow laws that had separated Whites from Blacks, believing that no good could ever spring from it:

In my humble opinion, it is better to admit the negro to all the stimulus and the inspiration of the white’s social heritage, so far as it applies to economic equality of opportunity given through industrial education, in so far as it does not endanger the integrity of the social heritage itself, than to encourage an ignorant and debased citizenship by his neglect and repression.

Mathew Brady at Antietam
(NY Times, 1862)

An anonymous reviewer tells his readers about the mournful spirit that dominated each room at the Matthew Brady Gallery where he attended a unique exhibit of the photographer’s Civil War pictures:

At the door of his gallery hangs a little placard ‘The Dead of Antietam’. Crowds of people are constantly going up the stairs; follow them…there is a terrible fascination about it that draws one near these pictures, and makes you loath to leave them. You will see hushed, reverend groups standing around these weird copies of carnage, bending down to look in the pale faces of the dead, chained by the strange spell that dwells in dead men’s eyes.

It was on the first day at Gettysburg that the Confederates made a terrible mistake. Read about it here.

Gas Attack Horrors
(NY Times, 1915)

French novelist Pierre Loti (né Julien Viaud: 1850 – 1923) filed this dispatch from a forward aid station in the the French sector where he witnessed the suffering of the earliest gas attack casualties:

A place of horror which one would think Dante had imagined. The air is heavy, stifling; two or three little night lamps, which look as if they were afraid of giving too much light, hardly pierce the hot, smoky darkness which smells of fever and sweat. Busy people are whispering anxiously. But you hear, more than all, agonized gasping. These gaspings escape from a number of little beds drawn up close together on which are distinguished human forms, above all, chests, chests that are heaving too strongly, too rapidly, and that raise the sheets as if the hour of the death rattle had already come.

Click here to read about the new rules for warfare that were written as a result of the First World War – none of them pertain to poison gas.

Kultur
(The New York Times, 1915)

During the course of the Great War, few German terms delighted English speaking cartoonists more than the word kultur -which is the Teutonic word for civilization or cultural progress. Prior to being picked up by the New York Times, this cartoon originally appeared in a London magazine called, The Sketch, and was drawn by W. Heath Robinson (dates?).

Enrico Forlanini and His Dirigible
(New York Times, 1918)

A New York Times photograph and report on the military dirigible designed by Italian Senator Enrico Forlanini (1848 – 1930). A concise account of the differences between Forlanini’s dirigible and the German Zeppelin are listed as well as the speed, altitude and various offensive capabilities. Enrico Forlanini is is best remembered today for his ground breaking work on steam-powered helicopters, hydrofoils and various other aircrafts, such as his 1909 dirigible, Leonardo Da Vinci.

The Winter Look for Flappers
(NY Times, 1922)

Stockings Scare Dogs

-so ran the sub head-line for this news article from the early Twenties which attempted to explain to one and all what the new look for the winter of 1921 – 1922 was all about.

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