Month: November 2018

Songs from Broadway musicals boosted American spirits during the Great Depression. Cole Porter’s 1934 score for Anything Goes, starring Ethel Merman as Reno Sweeney and William Gaxton as Billy Crockett, was a popular source. However, when the show was made into a movie in 1936, featuring Merman and Bing Crosby, Production Code censors nixed the saucy lyrics of the stage production. The only remaining numbers were “Anything Goes,” “I Get A Kick Out of You,” “There’ll Always Be a Lady Fair,” and “You’re the Top.” Read more music history in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

Pentecostals are known for speaking in tongues, whether through Glossolalia (unintelligible utterances) or Xenoglossy (articulating a natural language previously unknown to the person). Pentecostalists also practice divine healing and believe in the gift of prophecy. Many mainstream religions dispute the Christian tenets of Pentecostalism, sometimes resulting in violent clashes. Read about religious tensions in America’s heartland 100 years ago in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

The annual Macy’s Parade was started in 1924 by the department store’s immigrant employees, grateful for the warm welcome and open opportunities in their new country. At first called a Christmas parade, it was soon changed to Thanksgiving to make it more inclusive. The original marchers were store workers and professional entertainers who traveled from 145th Street in Harlem to Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street, wearing vibrant costumes from their homelands. The parade included floats, bands, and live animals borrowed from the Central Park Zoo. Balloons replaced live animals in 1927; helium filling was first used in 1928, and Mickey Mouse was introduced in 1934. Crowds of over one million people lined the streets to watch. Read more about the parade’s immigrant origins in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

When the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz was made, Technicolor was a relatively new process. Intense, saturated colors were a hallmark of the film. Artists debated for six weeks before choosing just the right color for the yellow brick road. Dorothy’s ruby slippers required much less debate. Read more about the making of the movie in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

In 1938, the San Diego Civic Center (now the County Administration Center) opened, including sculptor Donal Hord’s monumental stone statue “Guardian of Water,” which still stands on the Harbor Drive side of the building. Carved from a 22-ton granite block, the statue shows a pioneer woman holding a jug, symbolic of the city’s precious resource: water. The mosaic tiles at the fountain’s base symbolize clouds from which water streams into images of orchards and then flows on to the carved sea creatures in the fountain’s basin. Hord’s intent was to show the importance of water in the cycle of nature. Discover more San Diego history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

In the first half of the nineteenth century, as more girls attended high school and college, the medical establishment became alarmed. Edward Hammond Clarke, a respected Harvard-trained physician, claimed educating girls was dangerous. He said that when girls aged 13 to 17 spent too much time learning, it hindered the growth of their ovaries and uterus. Boys could handle six to eight hours of schooling a day; girls no more than four or five. Read more about Clarke’s theories and his “evidence” in BEHIND THE STORY.

Most Italian male immigrants in the 1900s were manual laborers, constructing public works such as roads, sewers, subways, and bridges. Women worked as seamstresses in factories or did piece work at home. Many established small businesses to serve fellow immigrants in their city’s Little Italy neighborhood. Read more about Italian-Americans at the beginning of the last century in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).