Category: Learn History Through Fiction

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).

This Sunday, November 11, is the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One. At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the Armistice was signed. The Great War took the lives of 10 million soldiers worldwide, including over 117,000 Americans, and decimated the French and Belgian countryside. Singularly, the windblown seeds of poppies thrived in the blood-soaked soil, and became a symbol of the dead, as memorialized in John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields.” Read more about WWI in On the Shore (see NOVELS).

In September 1941, isolationist Senator Gerald Nye charged Hollywood, many of whose studios were headed by Jews, with producing pro-war movies “to drug the reason of the American people, set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, and fill them with fear that Hitler will come over here and capture them.” In truth, it was just the opposite. With Europe a big consumer of American. cinema, studios were afraid to offend the Nazis. That changed in December 1941, after Pearl Harbor, when Hollywood enlisted in the war cause by producing combat films with major stars and patriotic cartoons with Disney characters. Read more about Hollywood and WWII in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional for Congress to enact child labor laws, which was the right of states only. In the Progressive Era, public outcry against child labor grew. Children worked 60-70 hours a week, often in hazardous conditions, which documentary photographer Lewis Hines said left them “stunted mentally and physically.” Child accident rates were three times those of adults. While recognizing the adverse effects, the Court said Congress could not control such practices when they involved products, such as cotton goods, that were not inherently immoral. Read more about labor laws over the last century in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

Andy Warhol, the youngest of three boys, was born in 1928 in Pittsburgh to working class emigrants from Slovakia. His father, a coal miner, died in an accident when Warhol 13. In third grade, Warhol developed chorea, a nervous system disorder that causes involuntary movements of the extremities and permanent skin blotches. He became a hypochondriac, afraid of doctors and hospitals, and was often bedridden. As a result, he was an outcast among his peers and drew close to his mother. While he was confined to bed, Warhol listened to the radio, drew, and collected pictures of movie stars. He said this period formed his personality, and gave him the set of skills and preferences that shaped his artwork. Read more about Andy Warhol in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

The name “Topeka” (meaning unknown) is believed to derive from the languages of the Kansa and Ioway tribes. City founders chose it because it “was novel, of Indian origin, and euphonious of sound.” Laid out in 1854, Topeka was a Free-State town established by Eastern anti-slavery men after passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Bill. Read more Topeka and Kansas history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).