Berlin, May 1915. Three feminists on an historical mission — Jane Addams and New York native Alice Hamilton from the United States, and Aletta Jacobs from the Netherlands — meet Wilbur H. Durborough. The American photographer and filmmaker had traveled to Berlin with his cameraman, Irving G. Ries, to shoot footage for his war documentary On the Firing Line with the Germans (1915). [Read more…] about Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton & The Hague Women’s Congress
Peace Studies
David Lowe Dodge: The Merchant Peacemaker
While carrying a large sum of money on a business trip in 1805, the well-to-do city of New York merchant, David Low Dodge, who had been fast asleep in a tavern, was suddenly awakened by the noise of someone jiggling the lock to his bedroom door. Startled by the rattling doorknob and as the door slowly opened, Dodge, not taking any chances, quietly turned and reached for the pistol he always carried for protection.
And then, just before he was about to discharge his pistol, he recognized the suspected intruder as the innkeeper who had come to prepare the room for other guests. [Read more…] about David Lowe Dodge: The Merchant Peacemaker
The Red Scare: A Personal History
The Seagle Festival will present the contemporary opera “Fellow Travelers” in Schroon Lake, NY August 3rd through 6th.
“Fellow Travelers” is set in the Washington, DC of the 1950s, as the anti-communist crusades of Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy and their ilk infiltrate and all but overwhelm every department, agency and office in government.
I can not help but reminded of my own family’s experience with “the Red Scare” during the administration of President Harry Truman. [Read more…] about The Red Scare: A Personal History
John Hersey and the Hiroshima Cover-up
In Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a crisply-written, well-researched book, Lesley Blume, a journalist and biographer, tells the fascinating story of the background to John Hersey’s path-breaking article “Hiroshima” and of its extraordinary impact upon the world.
In 1945, although only 30 years of age, Hersey was a very prominent war correspondent for Time magazine — a key part of publisher Henry Luce’s magazine empire — and living in the fast lane. That year, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, A Bell for Adano, which had already been adapted into a movie and a Broadway play. Born the son of missionaries in China, Hersey had been educated at upper class, elite institutions, including the Hotchkiss School, Yale, and Cambridge. During the war, Hersey’s wife, Frances Ann, a former lover of young Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, arranged for the three of them to get together over dinner. Kennedy impressed Hersey with the story of how he saved his surviving crew members after a Japanese destroyer rammed his boat, PT-109. This led to a dramatic article by Hersey on the subject — one rejected by the Luce publications but published by the New Yorker. The article launched Kennedy on his political career and, as it turned out, provided Hersey with the bridge to a new employer – the one that sent him on his historic mission to Japan. [Read more…] about John Hersey and the Hiroshima Cover-up