During World War II, Walt Disney Studios produced many propaganda cartoons for the government, starring Donald Duck and other well-known characters. Their subjects ranged from the importance of paying your income tax to farting in Der Fuehrer's...

In 1938, with war looming in Europe, Irving Berlin offered popular singer Kate Smith a new patriotic song to debut on her radio show. It’s forgotten today that in the form she sang it, “God Bless America” wasn’t just a patriotic anthem, it was ...

On the night of Wednesday, June 22, 1938, the whole world was focused on Yankee Stadium. Joe Louis, nicknamed the Brown Bomber, was fighting a rematch with Max Schmeling, called Hitler’s Superman. This was much more than a prizefight. Around th...

No one captured New York City in its noir 1930s and 1940s better than the photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. Ceaselessly roaming New York's streets, often at night while his competitors slept, Weegee took thousands and thousand...

When Moe Asch died in 1986, his extraordinarily eclectic Folkways Records had put out 2,186 long-playing records, from Woody Guthrie to Ho Chi Minh, Leadbelly to Langston Hughes, jazz, gospel, Yiddish music, calypso, and instructional records l...

During World War II, Times Square was crowded with soldiers and sailors, and girls and women who wanted to be around them. The authorities labeled these females "victory girls," "khaki-wackies," and even "patriotutes."Excerpted from my ...

Oberleutnant Franz Baron von Werra, a German Luftwaffe ace, came to New York City in 1941, and was treated like a visiting celebrity. He had been shot down over England, made a few nearly successful escape attempts there, and was being shipped ...

When Frank Sinatra performed his first live show at the Times Square Paramount Theatre in December 1942, the packed house, estimated at 5,000 girls (in a space with an official capacity of 3,500), exploded in deafening shrieks and screams. Sina...

Robert Downey, Jr., delivered his first spoken line in a feature-length motion picture at the age of five. He played a puppy in a film called Pound, written and directed by his dad, whose other prodigiously weird films include the scat...

Al Smith, King Kong, Donald Trump, and the Empire State Building#johnstrausbaugh #kingkong #donaldtrump #empirestatebuilding

In 1966, Jimi Hendrix – who was then still an obscure musician going as Jimmy James -- wandered into a club near Times Square called the African Room. On stage he saw a tall, muscular black man in a black leotard, boots with eight-inch heels, a...

Ronald Reagan was the first television celebrity to become President. That was quite remarkable in the 1980s, when no one knew what the 21st Century would bring. A handful of rehearsed poses, he was less the country's leader than its logo.<...

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was one of the oddest characters in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Her bizarre outfits and outlandish behavior were legendary. Was she just a troubled eccentric, or a pioneering feminist and artist? An exc...

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Russian émigré Nicholas Roerich was one of the most famous painters in America. His work was shown around the country, and widely praised. The art was only part of Roerich’s appeal. His occult side drew not just fans...

In the 20th century, nudists and publications about nudism were subject to all sorts of censorship and legal harassment. Nudist magazine publishers went to great lengths to avoid obscenity charges, which led, sadly, to some unintentionally hila...

In 1956, the pioneering radio host Jean Shepherd orchestrated one of the great literary hoaxes of all time, the saucy novel "I, Libertine."#hoax #JeanShepherd #libertine #GreenwichVillage #radio #TheodoreSturgeon #KellyFreas #MadMagazin...

Gazing at the faces of Guanajuato's famous mummies can make you wonder what kind of expression you'll wear when you face death. #Mexico #mummies #Guanajuato #Mexicanwrestler #Santo #RayBradbury #OctavioPaz #death

In the 1920s and 30s, Benito Mussolini and his Fascists enjoyed broad popularity in America. Like certain political figures today, he was seen as a "strongman" who brought order to Italy and was a bulwark against the spread of international bol...

On the morning of October 12, 1964, a drab green bus pulled up near a launchpad at the Soviet spaceport called the Baikonur Cosmodrome in bleak and dreary Kazakhstan. The door opened and three small men in soft white aviator caps and what looke...

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor began to reach New Yorkers in the middle of the afternoon.  In the Brill Building, America's pop songwriters went to war that very day. They reacted to Pearl Harbor w...

The Soviets put the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into space 61 years ago, on June 16, 1963. They did it to beat the Americans at it. Having done that, it was another 20 years before the next female cosmonaut flew... An excerpt from my boo...

An excerpt from my book The Wrong Stuff.

In 1959, in the basement of a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Richard and Dorothea Tyler founded an avant-garde artists’ collective and funeral society called the Uranian Phalanstery and First New York Gnostic Lyceum Temple. The T...

Throughout World War II, Wall Street banks and giant American corporations traded with the Nazis and Japanese and played both sides in the war. They included Chase National Bank, Standard Oil, DuPont, and General Motors, among others. The impul...

Sixty-three years ago, on April 12 1961, Yuri Gagarin fell out of the sky. He was the first human to go to outer space. He almost didn't make it back alive. In their "space race" against the well-heeled Americans, the Soviets rushed their scien...