The Peacetime Draft Comes to America
On May 8, 1940, a small group of middle-aged men representing the Executive Committee of the Second Corps Area, Military Training Camps Association(MTCA) met...
The Bonus March
The commanding general believed the situation was well in hand; he would continue his advance towards the river and save his nation from disaster....
Wartime Baseball
On a cold January day six weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt answered a letter from baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis...
The Dust Bowl
An eerie darkness enveloped the city of Chicago on the afternoon of November 12, 1933. The previous day this darkness had been a massive...
D-Day USA
In the early hours of Tuesday, June 6, 1944, in New York City’s Times Square, a group of cab drivers, a cop on the...
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...
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...
Sellin’ Apples
“When we started this thing at the beginning of National Apple Week we had no idea it would expand in this way,” said Joseph...
The World of Tomorrow in a World Gone Mad
On April 28, 1939, Adolf Hitler stood on the podium of the German Reichstag. In front of Hitler sat his Nazi sycophants; behind and...
Christmas 1941
War and Christmas are the antithesis of each other. In December 1941, Americans had to endure one while trying to enjoy the other. Since...