Ann S. Epstein Writer

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).

Fashion trends of the 1930s were a response to the Depression. They included synthetic fabrics that could be more cheaply manufactured than using natural fibers (rayon instead of cotton, nylon stockings instead of silk); recycled burlap flour sacks; color and pattern to liven up otherwise dreary lives; and zippers which were less labor intensive to install than buttons or other fasteners. For the few remaining wealthy folks, winter vacations in the Mediterranean and the Bahamas allowed them to sport tans emphasized by sparkling white dinner jackets and shimmering ivory evening gowns. Read more about fashion trends across the decades in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

On 06/11/1957, the U.S. Air Force launched the first operational missile, the Atlas D, in San Diego. Atlas became a workhorse for the space program, sending John Glenn in Mercury 7 into space for the nation’s first manned orbital flight in 1962. Discover more about San Diego’s historic role in aviation in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

To facilitate and legalize antisemitism, Nazi Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg Laws classified people with four German grandparents as “German or kindred blood,” while those with three or four Jewish grandparents were classified as Jews. A person with one or two Jewish grandparents was a Mischling, a crossbreed, of “mixed blood.” Marriage, even sexual intercourse, was forbidden between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. The laws also stripped German Jews of their citizenship and forbid their employment, education, and participation in civic and social life. To some extent, the Nuremberg laws were an attempt to return 20th century Germany Jews to the status they held before their 19th century emancipation. Read more about Nazi Germany in the lead-up to WWII in A Brain. A Heart. The Nerve. (see NOVELS).

The lawsuit that resulted in the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling was filed by 13 parents on behalf of their 20 children in Topeka, Kansas. The named plaintiff, Oliver Brown, was a welder for the Santa Fe Railroad and an assistant pastor at his church. His daughter Linda, who lived 7 blocks from a white school, had to walk 6 blocks to ride a school bus to the black school a mile away. Read more about race relations in Topeka 100 years ago in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).