Triple Teamed
World War Two on the home front produced some strange sights: teenagers driving old jalopies on their rims because of tire rationing, children pulling...
Sunday Evening at the Movies
Imagine a heat wave — one of the worst in American history. We are back in the torrid summer of 1934, the third weekend...
The Dragon Lady Conquers America, Part 1
Cornell Newton Shelton, known as C.N., stood freezing in the pre-dawn darkness of Chengtu, China. Shelton, an American bush pilot, preferred jockeying planes around...
The Hollywood Victory Caravan
On a late April afternoon in 1942, Eleanor Roosevelt stood on the White House lawn greeting a reception line of Hollywood stars. When each...
Before the Crash
On Wall Street in April 1929, everybody was making fortunes - shoeshine boys, cabbies, widows with a few bucks. Hundreds of dollars in stock...
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...
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...
The Big BOO!
A man in Pittsburgh opened his front door and heard a sad voice; the voice came from the radio and seemed to be mourning...
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...
The Navy’s V-12 Program
During the Second World War, the United States Navy commissioned over 5,500 ships, created six Marine divisions, and built hundreds of naval shore bases...