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"How can you help being pessimistic when you hear that the boy you sat next to in high school English was killed last week in Korea?"

- opined one of the nine college women interviewed on the attached pages. These Cold War women were asked what was on their minds as they prepared for jobs, marriage and family.


Dr. Seuss Tried His Hand at Grown-Up Fiction (Stage Magazine, 1937)

Dr. Seuss (Theodor Seuss Geisel: 1904 – 1991) was all of 33 years of age when this one page piece of fiction appeared in The Stage Magazine; that same year his first book went to press, And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. The article is illustrated by one of his delightful drawings that future generations would come to know so well.


The Sherman (Newsweek Magazine, 1942)

"'We're so far ahead of that Heinie in tank design and production that he's never going to catch us' - that was the opinion expressed by Major General Levin H. Campbell (1886 - 1976), the War Department's Ordnance Chief, in an interview in New York last week. He quoted a British officer as saying that the American M-4 General Sherman tank is the 'answer to a tankman's prayer.'"


The Collapse of the European Aristocracy (NY Times, 1919)

"The three great military monarchies which have lately fallen to pieces - Russian, Austro-Hungarian and German - were all based upon an aristocracy of large landed properties, whereas the other European countries had become parliamentary and democratic states. Europe was thus divided between two political orders, founded on two social orders, in fact, into two different worlds between which the river Elbe was approximately the boundary..."

"The war proved a decisive test of the stability of the two social orders; the democratic states went through it without flinching, the monarchies which had which had engendered the war in the hope of strengthening their position have gone under; from their defeat has sprung the revolution, which is overthrowing all aristocracies."

Click here to read a 1916 Vanity Fair article about how the war had affected the British upper class.

Fashion Police (American Magazine, 1943)

Who was it who deprived men of their suit vests and trouser cuffs? Who banned silk stockings? Who outlawed the "flow" in "flowing skirts"? Why, it was the War Production Board of course - click the title link if you want a name and a face...


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.


Review of Kaiser Wilhelm's Memoir (The Spectator, 1922)

Surprisingly, a British magazine published a terribly dry and unsympathetic review of My Memoirs by Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859 - 1941).

Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.


The W.W. II Revival In Faith (American Magazine, 1942)

"When mobilization began, the government, as usual, undertook to provide spiritual ministry for the men. But many veteran clergymen doubted whether religion would catch on... But religion did catch on - and with such vigor that the chaplaincy services have been swamped by it. Army and Navy chapels are jam-packed. Demands for special services, for Bible study and for religious instruction, are more than can be met. Many men - Protestant and Catholic - are being baptized or confirmed. Some chaplains report an almost overwhelming interest in religion and church as a career."

Click here to read about the renewed interest in religion that existed on the home front...

The Prophet of the Beats (Nugget Magazine, 1960)

"Howl is written," says Ginsberg, peering as he does through his glasses with a friendly intermingling of smile and solemnity, "in some of the rhythm of Hebraic liturgy - chants as they were set down by the Old Testament prophets. That's what it's supposed to represent - prophets howling in the Wilderness. That, in fact, is what the whole Beat Generation is, if it's anything, - howling in the Wilderness against a crazy civilization."


A Bewildering American Phenomenon (Scribner's Magazine, 1937)

This well-read writer recalls the great novels leading up to the publication of Gone With The Wind (1936). Along the way, she lists some of the many foibles of The Great American Reading Public - in the end she recognizes that she shouldn't have been surprised at all that the historic romance was an all-time-best-seller and that Margaret Mitchell was awarded a Pulitzer.