Leaking V-E Day
Adolph Hitler’s suicide, in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945, led to the European war’s final act — the German surrender. After Hitler’s...
V-J Day: The Greatest Celebration
The celebrations on V-E Day, May 8, 1945, were spontaneous and joyful, yet everyone knew the victory over Hitler gave the world only partial...
Musical Chairs Part 2
In 1941, James Caesar Petrillo, the outspoken president of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), commissioned a study to determine whether the use of...
Musical Chairs Part 1
Something was missing from the radio air waves on January 1, 1941 — the music of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins and hundreds...
Casablanca and the Missing Reference
This holiday season marks sixty years since the premiere, on Thanksgiving Day 1942, of Warner Brother’s classic motion picture, Casablanca. Many myths have arisen...
Happy Franksgiving?
Toward the end of the 1942 movie Holiday Inn staring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire (this movie introduced Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”), a November...
Midnight Ride Through Georgia: Passing the GI Bill
From the conception of the “GI Bill of Rights” in late 1943 to its spring passage in the Senate (50 to 0) and House...
The Year the Tax Man Did Not Cometh
At the close of 1941, Henry Morgenthau had the toughest job any treasury secretary ever faced — finance the Second World War. The United...
Over and Up
In the spring of 1931, men stood on New York City street corners selling apples; other men stood on soup-kitchen lines; still other men...
An Evening by the Radio
Let’s travel back in time to a spring afternoon in New York City during World War II. The time is 5:30 p.m. on a...