Category: Overseas
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The Prince, Prize Matrimonial
A 1922 New York Times Magazine article asked whether the 28-year-old Prince of Wales, who would later become King Edward VIII, would ever marry. 14 years later, he would abdicate the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée, making him the shortest-serving monarch in British history. Which makes this excerpt describing the then-28-year-old Edward,…
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If Wells Went to Parliament
Few remember that British science fiction novelist H.G. Wells, author of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, ran for the House of Commons in 1922. Today, this fact doesn’t even merit a mention on Wells’ Wikipedia page. Yet he did run for the lower house of the British Parliament, and for a most unusual…
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Jazz Latitutde
After jazz first emerged in New Orleans in the early 1910s, it spread across the country. A 1922 New York Times Magazine article documented how the genre had by then gone global, summing it up in a single 242-word sentence: Jazz latitude is marked as indelibly on the globe as the heavy line of the…
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Soviet Smoke Screen and the Hague
A June 1922 international conference at the Hague aimed to settle Soviet Russia’s economic issues. For example, should the nation be absolved of its WWI debts? Although more than 30 nations participated, primarily from Europe, the U.S. refused: The Russian memorandum of May 11… set forth that Russia of the Soviets was not bound to…
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The Old Pope and Papal Prestige
In February 1922, there was a new pope: Pius XI. The man born Ambrogio Damiano Achille Ratti would serve for 17 years and lead Vatican City’s creation as a sovereign state in 1929, separate from Italy. This New York Times Magazine article wrote in February 1922 of the new pope, comparing and contrasting him with…
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Italy’s Frankenstein and His Monster
A January 1922 New York Times Magazine article described Benito Mussolini as a rising figure in Italy. By October, he would be Prime Minister. Mussolini had helped birth the Italian fascists (Fascismo) who used rough tactics, up to and including extrajudicial killings, in the name of law and order. As the article explains: After the…
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The Un-Solemn Irish Free State
A new country was created in December 1921: the Irish Free State. This article asked whether it might become “the first demonstration of government with a sense of humor.” Instead, the country was almost immediately plunged into civil war. Whatever the Irish Free State does, it will not be the usual or conventional thing. A…
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“Jazz ‘er Up!”: Broadway’s Conquest of Europe
Jazz, that uniquely American art form, was beginning to take Europe by storm in 1921. In Paris and a score of other European centres of gayety the words “fox-trot” and “one-step” have become so much a part of the local language that natives have to think twice to remember that the words were originally imported…
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Playing the King
In 1921, as monarchies in several other nations had recently fallen, a New York Times Sunday Magazine article noted the curiosity that the monarchy in England remained. And it still does. Of the surprises that have followed the war, one of the strangest is the fact that, with the three great Emperors of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia…
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An Officially Independent Afghanistan
100 years ago, in 1921, Afghanistan gained its independence from Great Britain. A New York Times Magazine article that year portrayed the newly-independent nation as something akin to Atlantis, a land of mystery, as so few Americans had ever set foot there. Not more than one American in ten years has ever gone up the…
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