Send us a Text Message. On Sunday, December 7, 1941, news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor began to reach New Yorkers in the middle of the afternoon. In the Brill Building, America's pop songwriters went to war that very day. They reacted to Pearl Harbor with instant fury and patriotic zeal, churning out hundreds of war songs at a ferocious c…

Send us a Text Message. The Soviets put the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into space 61 years ago, on June 16, 1963. They did it to beat the Americans at it. Having done that, it was another 20 years before the next female cosmonaut flew... An excerpt from my book, "The Wrong Stuff." https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/th…

Send us a Text Message. An excerpt from my book The Wrong Stuff. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-stuff/9781541703346/Kirjoittanut John Strausbaugh

Send us a Text Message. In 1959, in the basement of a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Richard and Dorothea Tyler founded an avant-garde artists’ collective and funeral society called the Uranian Phalanstery and First New York Gnostic Lyceum Temple. The Tylers were influential underground figures in postwar New York City culture. They …

Send us a Text Message. Throughout World War II, Wall Street banks and giant American corporations traded with the Nazis and Japanese and played both sides in the war. They included Chase National Bank, Standard Oil, DuPont, and General Motors, among others. The impulse to prosecute them as traitors for their financial dealings with the Nazis and J…

Send us a Text Message. Sixty-three years ago, on April 12 1961, Yuri Gagarin fell out of the sky. He was the first human to go to outer space. He almost didn't make it back alive. In their "space race" against the well-heeled Americans, the Soviets rushed their scientists, cut corners, and were very careless with their cosmonauts' lives. Gagarin w…

Send us a Text Message. Zombie apocalypse. AI annihilating us. Killer asteroids. Godzilla's comeback. War, plague, famine, crime. Why are we so obsessed with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios? Maybe we're unconsciously but very publicly acknowledging the fact that the apocalypse isn't coming, it already happened. The world ended in the 20t…

Send us a Text Message. In the years leading up to World War 2, New York's pro-Hitler German American Bund had their own summer camp on Long Island, Camp Siegfried. NOTE: I do not own this image.Kirjoittanut John Strausbaugh

Send us a Text Message. During World War 2, “zoot suit” was synonymous with “juvenile delinquent.” What the black leather jacket and the hoodie have been to later generations, the zoot suit was to the World War 2 years.Kirjoittanut John Strausbaugh

Send us a Text Message. The coming of World War 2 politicized an illustrator who’d previously been known only for wacky advertisements and surrealist children’s books. His name was Theodor Geisel, but he's universally known as Dr. Seuss. NOTE: I do not own this image.Kirjoittanut John Strausbaugh

Send us a Text Message. The New York House of Detention for Women -- aka the House of D -- had a number of star visitors, including Angela Davis. NOTE: I do not own this image.Kirjoittanut John Strausbaugh

Send us a Text Message. W. R. Burnett isn't quite as well known as other crime writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but the titles of several of his novels and films – Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle -- everybody knows.Kirjoittanut John Strausbaugh

Send us a Text Message. Greenwich Village enjoyed its last great flowering as the bohemian capital of America from the years following World War 2 through the 1970s. It still drew pilgrims and exiles from around the world. Among them were a bounty of creative geniuses who made the neighborhood a whirring dynamo of culture.…

Send us a Text Message. By the 1910s the whole world seemed to know that Greenwich Village was the Left Bank of America. It was familiar enough that P.G. Wodehouse could poke fun at it in a Broadway musical. Its crooked streets and romantic garrets drew the likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Eugene O'Neill, …

Send us a Text Message. Greenwich Village was a Mecca for misfits and refuge for outsiders for a very long time. Blacks, Italians and Irish, artists across the genres, anarchists and communists, gays and lesbians, intellectuals, eccentrics, visionaries and life's adventurers were all drawn there. An astonishing Who's Who of world culture made the V…

Send us a Text Message. Country singer-songwriter Roger Miller was best known for his do-wacka-do hits, but like other novelty stars, he had hidden depths.Kirjoittanut John Strausbaugh

Send us a Text Message. In the 1930s, Laura Ingalls was a stunt and race pilot about as famous as Amelia Earhart. But she became best known for something else -- her championing of Adolf Hitler.Kirjoittanut John Strausbaugh

Send us a Text Message. On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito went on Japanese radio, announcing the end of the war in the Pacific. An 86-year-old retired general, Shiba Goro, decided to commit seppuku, ritual suicide. That in itself isn’t especially noteworthy. Hundreds of Japanese officers at the time were deciding to follow the old samurai way of…

Send us a Text Message. In August 1934, Dorothy Thompson was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, on Hitler’s direct order. She was on her way to being one of the most widely read, discussed, and argued about journalists of the era.Kirjoittanut John Strausbaugh

Send us a Text Message. Gherman Titov was the second Soviet cosmonaut to go into space, but the first one to visit America. Things didn't quite go as planned.Kirjoittanut John

Send us a Text Message. It was said that Maxwell Bodenheim was "more disliked, derided, denounced, beaten up, and kicked down more flights of stairs than any poet of whom I have heard or read." And that was said by a friend.Kirjoittanut John

Send us a Text Message. Before dawn on April 26, 1865, a detachment of the 16th New York Volunteer Cavalry found John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, holed up in a Virginia tobacco barn. They were under strict orders from the Secretary of War to take Booth alive. But one man who rode with the 16th answered to a higher authority: Sergeant …

Send us a Text Message. The 1939 New York World's Fair, projecting a future of peace and prosperity, opened in a world that was tilting into war. By the time it closed in 1940 the Fair, like the world, was in shambles.Kirjoittanut John

Send us a Text Message. On a sunny afternoon in 1939, the physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner visited Albert Einstein at his beach cottage on Long Island. They wanted him to write to President Franklin Roosevelt about the need to develop the atom bomb before the Nazis could.Kirjoittanut John

Send us a Text Message. Victoria Woodhull, the first female candidate for president of the United States, sat out the election in a jail cell. She achieved several firsts for women in America, yet her impact on the women's movement was so controversial, and in the end so negligible, that she's a minor figure in feminist history, but a fascinating o…