Friday, January 28, 1916. Manitoban women became the first Canadian women to gain the franchise.

Manitoban women became the first Canadian women to gain the franchise.

President Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. He would be confirmed on June 1, 1916 and become the first Jewish justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Last edition:

Thursday, January 27, 1916. Britain introduces conscription.

Labels: 1910s, 1916, Art, British Army, Conscription, Judaism, Woodrow Wilson

 

Cheyenne Wilson

Tuesday, January 22, 1946. Central Intelligence Group formed.

The Truman Administration formed the Central Intelligence Group, with its official duties being:

The Central Intelligence Group is a recently created interdepartmental organization in which the State, War, Navy, and sometimes other departments participate. It coordinates all activities of the Government involved in obtaining and analyzing information about foreign countries which this country needs for its national security. It also furnishes interdepartmental analyses of this type of information or use by Government officials.

The immediate predecessor, the OSS, had been disbanded. The Group itself would evolve into the CIA very quickly.

Qazi Muhammed establishing the Republic of Mahabad. He'd be hung by Iran in 1947.

The Socialist Soviet puppet state of the Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, also referred to as the Republic of Kurdistan, (Kurdish: کۆماری کوردستان, romanized: Komarî Kurdistan; Persian: جمهوری مهاباد,) was formed in the Soviet occupied portion of northern Iran.

Last edition:

Monday, January 21, 1946. Steelworkers Strike.

Labels: 1940s, 1946, Labor unrest, Strike Wave of 1945-1946

Monday, January 17, 1916. Female marksman.

There was dramatic news on the cover of the Casper paper:

But I'm actually posting this one for the story on the champion teenage female marksman.

Last edition:

Saturday, January 15, 1916. Russian victory.

Labels: 1910s, 1916, Art, Battle of Koprukoy, Bulgaria, Disaster, Imperial Russian Army, Mexican Border War, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Norway, Norway (Bergen), Ottoman Army, Pancho Villa, Woodrow Wilson, World War One

A recent development in the story of women in combat roles in the U.S. military:

Pentagon orders review on ‘effectiveness’ of women in combat arms jobs

I think it's pretty clear that the leadership in the DoD feels that women should not be in combat roles.  I have some old threads on this, and I don't think they should be either, but the interesting thing here is how the DoD has crept up on this.

They must be uncomfortable with just issuing a decision, as over the past year they've taken incremental steps, which the administration really hasn't done on anything else.  It would sort of suggest that they think this is the bridge too far.

It might also suggest a bit of a realization that things can be reversed and therefore the goal is to build a basis to avoid a reversal.

Wednesday, December 30, 1925. Ben-Hur.

The first variant of Ben-Hur was released.

I tried listening to the book as an audio book once, but gave it up.  I should either try that again, or read it.

The Association of College Honor Societies was formed by representatives of six organizations, Alpha Omega Alpha; the Order of the Coif; Phi Beta Kappa; Phi Kappa Phi; Sigma Xi; Tau Beta Pi.  While nothing compared to the post World War Two boom in college attendance, the 1920s did see an increase in it, including an increase in female attendance.

Adding an item that would have properly been posted yesterday, but we were unaware of it, on December 28, 1925, this patent was granted:

We do not wish to be crude, but we do seek to track various developments on this blog.  Indeed, that's one of its main purposes.  This is a real development. This is a sanitary belt for menstruation, a very common, indeed the normal, method of addressing sanitary concerns until the tampon became common which wasn't really until the 1970s.

Anyhow, women in their current societal roles necessitated inventions such as this.  Kotex, the primary brand, was not introduced until 1920.

Related threads:

Clothing: It was because of World War One.

Labels: 1910s, Clothing, It was because of World War One, It was because of World War Two, Men, Standards, The roles of men and women, Women, World War One, World War Two, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History

Women and Trousers. No big historical deal, or the triumph of the harpies in trousers?

Labels: Christianity, Clothing, Islam, religion, Standards, The roles of men and women, trends, Women, World War One, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History

Last edition:

Sunday, December 27, 1925. Between time.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Cartoons, Christianity, Coal, Coptic, Disaster, Mexico, Mining, Oriental Orthodox

Friday, December 28, 1945. War Brides. Yank ends.

Congress enacted the War Brides Act allowing for admissible alien  spouses, natural children, and adopted children of American troops to enter the U.S. as non-quota immigrants.  The act expired in 1948.

Before expiring, about 70,000 British,, 150,000 to 200,000 Europeans, including 14,000 to 20,000 Germans, 50,000 to 100,000 from the Far East, including 51,747 Filipinas and 50,000 Japanese, and 16,000 Australian or New Zealander women came in through the act.  Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the numbers, in some ways, is the high number of Germans, given the nature of the war, and the comparatively high number of Japanese.  Also remarkable is that the marriages from Asia were interracial.

Yank announced that as of the end of the year, it was no more.

Less thought of today than The Stars and Stripes, the popular World War Two service published magazine had various theater editions and was popular, something aided by every issue having a mild cheesecake centerfold.

Last edition:

Thursday, December 27, 1945. Big Bills.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Belgium, Bretton Woods, Currency, United Nations, World Monetary Fund

Some unwanted Christmas introspection.

 

Today, of course, is Christmas Day.

Yesterday was Christmas Eve.  The occasion is one in which I've participated in the same workplace tradition now for almost four decades, a scary thought in and of itself.  I'll admit that I've grown very weary of it and have been now for quite a while.  It involves going to lunch with my coworker professional colleagues and it usually involves having drinks, a delay in ordering, more drinks, etc.

We always go to Mass on Christmas Eve.  Indeed, even as a child my family always went to Mass on Christmas Eve, although not Midnight Mass.  I've never been a night owl and I just don't want to be up that late.  That's the same reason I don't like to go to alte Easter Vigil Mass either.

I am, rather obviously, an early riser.  That's about the sole reason this blog even exists.  Almost everything on here is written very early in the morning.

Anyhow, as I was noting, I've grown really weary of the lunch.  It's clear to me that it's a big deal for some of my colleagues, but in noting that, what I further note is that the more secular they are, or the more convivial, the bigger the deal it is.  And for some it's a rememberance of those who started the tradition, in a decade that is now long past, and which is from nearly another world, the world of men at work without women as colleagues.  I'm not going into that here, although I will in the future.  I've never lived in it, and I don't imagine that world nostalgically.  My best workplace colleagues are women.

For me, with a sense that things must be on time and on target, I get really worried about things dragging on too long to get to Mass on time.  It's never happened, although for the first time yesterday it nearly did.

Things have been really odd recently, for reasons I'll not go into.  I realized right about noon that people had left, save for me and the one coworker I'm really a friend of/with/to.  I noted to her that everyone had left and perhaps we should too.

When I arrived it was rapidly clear something was gravely wrong.  The whole meal had that feeling, and at the end of it, a massive argument broke out/resumed between two individuals who had been engaged in it prior to our arrival.  Indeed, in reality, it was the culmination of an argument that had broken out in a heated fashion after the company Christmas Party (which this was not) and which, in retrospect, has been burning hot and cold now for months and months.

The whole spirit of the country is like that right now.

Around here, where it should be extremely cold right now, it's nearly summer temperature warm. That's not only weird, it's a massive warning sign.  This morning Doug Burgum is posting on "clean coal".  That's moronic and anyone with the slightest bit of sense knows that this has to stop.  Donald Trump, for his part, posted his typical stupid comments oozing anger and this:

I note this as part of what I think I witnessed was both the nation's politics and the nation's political atmosphere bleeding into daily life.  You can feel it everywhere. This must be what it was like to live in Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s.  The nation's gone insane, and a certain percentage of the nation is now angrily insane.

But it's more than that.  Part of it is, I"m sure, the inability to endure big changes and big expectations, combined with gross misunderstanding.  Part of it also is the anger that idol worshippers have when they realize their hero is human.  Maybe some of was the march of time on both parties.

Like several other things I've seen like this recently, I was so ill prepared for what I saw that my reaction time to it was just insufficient to deal with it.  It happened, nad was over, before I could do anything to stop it. And looking back, I should have stopped what I should have seen coming weeks ago. 

I've wearied and I'm not the man I used to be.  I'm too tired to put up with and endure such things. But why bring this up at Christmas? There must be some really hurt feelings today, and there must have been going into things.  For me, who has had to take up roles I never anticipated, it's a bitter failure and now a delicate matter to repair.

One thing I think I'm going to repair is the tradition.  It came out of the all male workplace past, and that day is over.  The tradition can remain in the past. The present and the passage of time overcame it.

More and more, the Mass part of Christmas, Christ's Mass, is the important part to me.  It always was really, but I managed to take the wrong road, the American Road, when I was young, even though I knew better.  The field, vette and prairie is what always appealed to me, and the book.  The courtroom not so much.  I've been dealing with the fact that its now too late to change that.

Or at least its too late to change the past.  Enduring the present and future of that, and the office, well not so much.  Sometimes the messages are clear.

"The man's done enough. Leave him alone."  Field of Dreams.

Tuesday, December 25, 1945. Christmas.

It was the first peacetime Christmas for much of the World since 1938, although in some areas of the globe new wars and the continuation of old wars raged on.

A souvenir edition of Stars and Stripes was put out for occupation forces in the Pacific.  It featured a 1946 calendar I'll decline to put up of pinup illustrations, in black and white, starting with a clearly Asian woman, chest hidden behind the month, followed by eleven other such girls until the last three months of the year in which the figures are much more clothed and American, with the suggestion being that the surprised GI is surprised in those months by the pursuit of an American girl whom he likely marries.

Japanese Admiral Shigematsu Sakaibara was sentenced to death by hanging for his role in the mass execution of the 98 American civilians on Wake Island on October 7, 1943.  He yelled out, prior to his sentencing, that Americans were equally as complicit due to the atomic bomb strikes earlier that year.

According to the Rocky Mountain News:

Truman pardoned 4,000 Federal convicts who had served in the Armed Forces during the war.

The RMN also contained cheesecake for its Christmas edition, with a picture of an 18 year old Miss Finland.

Normally I wouldn't have posted that either, but I'm struck by how much older than 18 she looks.  Photographs of late teens of the era, male and female, tend to show people who look older than the same ages today.

Bill Mauldin was appearing in stateside papers.

The Cold War was clearly arriving.

Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience was born in Folkstone, England.  He's pass away in 2003.

Last edition:

Monday, December 24, 1945. Patton laid to rest.

Labels: 1910s, 1915, 1916, Art, China, Christmas, Holidays, Mexican Border War, National Protection War, New Year

Thursday, December 24, 1925. Non è possibile scavalcare il Capo del Governo.

Winnie the Pooh was first identified by that name in a Christmas story by A. A. Milne.  Prior to that, his name had been Edward. 

The Italian parliament passed Law No. 2263, "Decree on powers of the head of government", declaring that the decisions of Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and his government were not subject to legislative review, and that Mussolini could only be overruled by order of the King.

Sort of like what Donald Trump would like to do now. . . but without the possibility of an interfering king.

 Mrs. Coolidge distributes Christmas bags for Central Union Mission

"Uncle Sam's Follies, 12/24/25"

Last edition:

Wednesday, December 23, 1925. Things in Arabia.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, First Saudi State, French Empire, French League of Nation Mandates, It was because of World War One, Lebanon, Monarchy, Petroleum, Saudi Arabia, Syria

 

‘Don’s Best Friend’: How Epstein and Trump Bonded Over the Pursuit of Women

Sunday, December 6, 1925: Red Grange Saves the NFL

 

December 6, 1925: Red Grange Saves the NFL

Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Today -100: December 6, 1925: I do and I don’t: Texas Attorney Gen. Dan Moody, who is not a fan of the governors Ferguson, seems to kill the idea of a special session to impeach Gov. Miri...

From Reddit's 100 Years Ago today:

Interesting to see this question being asked as early as 1925.

Last edition:

Saturday, December 5, 1925.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Art, Equine Transportation, Norman Rockwell, The relationship between men and women, Women

Saturday, December 5, 1925.

 

Last edition:

Thursday, December 3, 1925. Spain, Ulster and Romania.

Labels: 1920s, 1925, Ireland, Moldova, Northern Ireland, Romania, Spain, Spanish Civil War

Monday, November 26, 1945. Now's the Time, Wolves and War Brides, Questionable claim about Goering, Test tube babies in Virgin hospitals, Japanese social insurance, ties for Christmas.

Recorded on this day in 1945:

 The Sheridan Press reported on wolves and war brides.

The story on the big wolf is ironic in a contemporary context.  Wolves were wiped out in Colorado, probably and in Wyoming, probably, until the major reintroduction effort of the 2000s began.  It's been a huge success in Wyoming, for which I'm glad, in spite of my initial skepticism.  An ongoing effort is occuring in Colorado, which is meeting a lot of opposition in the anti nature Freedom Caucus era.

The Rocky Mountain News, which I remember from the 70s, 80s and 90s, when it was the best, in my view, of the two Denver papers, was a bit sensationalist at the time, which I've only recently come to appreciate.  It was always a "tabloid", with that sort of paper format for some reason having a reputation of that type.  I've never heard of the story related by the headline here:

A little digging finds that this claim was flat out untrue.

The News also reported on, oddly enough, test tube babies, something that is way earlier than I'd have ever supposed.

The first "test tube" baby was born in 1978.  That person Louise Brown, is still with us.  The first example of IVF in a mammal did not occur until 1959.  Apparently the proponent of this suggestion was well ahead of her time in terms of scientific knowledge.

It's notable that the suggestion had a strong eugenics characteristic.  That drive is also now very much coming into fruition, with designer babies now becoming a thing.

On the underlying concern, the explosion in births and the drop in the average age for a woman to first give birth that commenced at this time shows the concern was misplaced.  As a Catholic, of course, I regard IVF as both unnatural and immoral.  The bizarrely pro natalist Trump administration is all in on it.

The News also reported on Japanese social insurance, something being brought in by the progressive and distributist MacArthur occupation.

The cartoons of the day.

A classic gift was suggested.

British troops swept the Sharon plain in reaction to a prior days terrorist attack.

Ezra Pound was indicted for a second time on 19 counts of treason.

Last edition:

Sunday, November 25, 1945. Taxing war profits.

Labels: 1940s, 1945, Austria, Christian Democrats, Douglas MacArthur, Japan, Occupation of Japan, Taxes