Month: May 2018
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Total Eclipse of the Sun Next Saturday
We all remember the total solar eclipse last August, which passed over the United States. June 1918 saw one as well, starting in Washington state and moving southeast until it reached Florida. Actually, it started in a rather unusual way, as this contemporary article described: And here comes an odd point about this eclipse; it really begins […]
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One Year of Hoover’s Control: Food Enough for All Allies
More than a decade before he would be elected president in 1928, Herbert Hoover led the U.S. Food Administration, which exerted much control over the nation’s and Allies’ food supply. The appointment cave even though the Republican Hoover was named by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, a bipartisan move that would be difficult to imagine in today’s […]
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3,000 Planes a Month
America is the leader in aviation technology today, and has been for decades. But that was not the case in 1918, even though the Wright Brothers who hailed from Ohio had invented the airplane only a few years before. As this May 1918 article explained, the U.S. had some major catching up to do upon entering […]
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A Whole World Outraged
If Germany lost WWI, should they be granted the same status they had previously held in the European and world geopolitical landscape? That was the question facing American and the world in May 1918. George Trumbull Ladd, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Yale, argued no: The feelings of an outraged world against an outrageous […]
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Millions of Feet of Movie Films for Soldiers
Nearly a century before the release of — and subsequent suspected bomb scare related to — 2007’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, this 1918 article also contained the phrase “movie films.” But in this case, it referred to physical film, 7 to 8 million feet of which were shown to soldiers during World […]