Armistice Day One Hundred Years Later

Welcome Home Our Gallant Boys

Loretta reports:

Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice ending World War I—known as the Great War and the War to End War, until only a couple of decades later, when another great war broke out.

World War I was a horrendous war, even by war’s horrendous standards, as Wilfred Owen’s poetry makes more than clear. His war isn’t heroic or romantic. It’s ghastly and heartbreaking. For a time, his work fell out of favor for this reason. But only for a time.

An English professor introduced me to "Anthem for Doomed Youth" fifty or so years after it was written, at a time when it struck a chord with those protesting the Vietnam War. Owen’s and others’ poetry led me, some years later, to Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That, which offered insights into both the war and that generation of Englishmen. Unlike Owen, Graves survived.

For me, these works and others began an education that continues. Visits to English and Scottish churches, stately homes, and memorials have given me a powerful sense of the toll this particular war took on the other side of the Atlantic.

Anthem for Doomed Youth 1917

We keep hoping, but so far, no war has ended war. All we seem to be able to do is mourn and remember. The Tower of London remembers, beautifully and movingly, again this year, as you will discover if you search “Beyond the Deepening Shadow,” for images from the centenary commemoration.

Wilfred Owen

Images: Welcome Home Our Gallant Boys, 1918 poster, courtesy courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA; "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and photograph of Wilfred Owen from Poems by Wilfred Owen, 1920.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on a caption link will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed. And, just so you know, if you order a book through one of my posts, I might get a small share of the sale.

Election Day

No blog post today, except this one-word message for our American readers.

You know what to do, right?

Vote, published by the Milwaukee County League of Women Voters, early 20thc, Collection of the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Fashions for November 1913

Dresses November 1913

Loretta reports:

Let's read over the shoulder of a lady in 1913 who's just picked up the latest copy of Ladies Home Journal.

  What I See on Fifth Avenue by Alice Long: With Drawings by Jessie Gillespie.

“From the top of one of those lumbering, top-heavy busses that wheeze ponderously along Fifth Avenue is really the best place to get a good view, not alone of the shops that line the avenue, but also of the kaleidoscopic mass of color formed by the hurrying streams of woman shoppers. And if you are looking for what is new in fashion you are just as apt to see it on some of these same shoppers, many of whom have names that are household words because of their prominence socially or because of the financial rating of their men folks, as in even the most exclusive shops...

“I SPENT several days going through the more important Fifth Avenue shops and dressmaking places, and of one thing I am convinced: The fashionable silhouette demands fullness at the hips and a narrowing in at the foot; and be it peplum or tunic—call it what you please—some sort of flounce arrangement must be shown on the skirt of a fussy dress anywhere between the waistline and the feet. A strikingly pretty model of this sort of composite type formed the dress of one of the season’s débutantes, and was intended for a luncheon to be given in her honor. It was of a dull watermelon pink shade of silk crepe, with a. blouse of pale lilac chiffon over flesh-colored malines.* The Medici frill is wired with fine silk wire, so fine as to be invisible, and the plaited tunic, which is of the lilac chiffon, is also wired on the edge, so that it stands out the tiniest little bit.—Ladies’ Home Journal, Volume 30, November 1913 

 The whole article is an interesting read: the color red's popularity, the puzzle of wearing summer weight fashion in November and heavy fabrics in summer, etc.

*Malines in this context appears to refer to "Malines Lace—Bobbin lace with sprigs or dots outlined with a heavier cordonnet over a hexagonal or round mesh ground.  It is made in one piece of white flax thread."—Dictionary of Textiles, Harmuth 1915. Aka Mechlin Lace. You can read a history of lace here.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on a caption link will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Breakfast Links: Week of October 29, 2018

Breakfast Links are served! Our weekly round-up of favorite links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Does discovery of a red velvet bag reinforce the legend that Sir Walter Raleigh's widow Elizabeth kept his severed head with her after his execution?
• R is for raisins, the unexpected super-food found in many early modern medicines.
• Norah Smyth, suffragette photographer.
• Image: Cat passages in the doors at Thomas Jefferson's 18thc Monticello.
• The 19thc angel guides of death.
• Stylish (and prize-winning) 1959 dress, made from a feedsack.
• President George Washington's letter to the Hebrew congregation in Newport, RI, 1790.
• Image: Dubious tips on how to get a husband from an 1950s women's magazine.
• "Knackers pork": the grim reality of London slaughterhouses during the Regency.
• Elizabeth Thorn, the angel of the Battle of Gettysburg.
• Wheat the old way: 1940s video of Pennsylvania Dutch family harvesting wheat by hand, without modern machinery.
• From an 1930s trousseau: beautifully embroidered silk slip and tap pants.
• Image: 1850s child's leather boot decorated with a black cat.
• A Mandarin duck mysteriously appears on a pond in New York's Central Park.
• John Rogers and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
• The Kit-Kat Club, an 18thc literary, political, and social club that became a stronghold of the Whig party.
• Workers in a Goodwill store in New Jersey discover an important, original 1774 Philadelphia "rebel" newspaper.
• Fifteen important women in history that you may not have heard of.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.
Please note: I'll be traveling this week, so alas, no Breakfast Links next Sunday....

Friday Video: The Two-Handkerchief Bra, 1921

Courtesy Library of Congress

Loretta reports:

In the early days of the brassiere, two handkerchiefs would do, apparently.  Here's how to turn them into an undergarment.

Illustration Where there's smoke there's fire, Russell Patterson, 1920s. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA