Transcribing the Past

  From Hunter S. Thompson’s ESPN page 2 column one week after 9/11.    We are At War now, according to President Bush, and I take him at his word. He also says this War might last for "a very long time." Generals and military scholars will tell you that eight or 10 years is actually not such a long time in the span of human history - which is no doubt true - but history also tells us that 10 years of martial law and a wartime economy are going to feel like a Lifetime to people who are in their twenties today. The poor bastards of what will forever be known as Generation Z are doomed to be the first generation of Americans who will grow up with a lower standard of living than their parents enjoyed. That is extremely heavy news, and it will take a while for it to sink in. The 22 babies born in New York City while the World Trade Center burned will never know what they missed. The last half of the 20th century will seem like a wild party for rich kids, compared to what's com...

  START TO FIGHT SERBIANS.  Montenegrins said to have declared a Holy War. LONDON, Feb, 22, A wireless message from Berlin today says that, according to Swiss reports, the Montenegrins have declared a holy war against the Serbians. Two Serbian regiments have occupied Cettinje[sic], Montenegro, and the situation is grave, the message says.    Published 23rd of February 1921 in the New York Times.  Thus reads the above news clipping. I was not familiar with this period before reading this news snippet. In the aftermath of the First World War it was decided to build a Kingdom in the Balkans uniting Croats, Serbs and Slovenes, which in 1929 would become known as Yugoslavia. The Montenegrins independent before the war were also absorbed into the Union. It was not a peaceful union, as this report from the New York Times makes clear.  In 1919, tensions between the pro Serb union and the federalist Montenegrins laid to a failed uprising in Christmas 1919 with ...

       From the Montreal Star, February 4, 1939:  𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗿 𝗚𝗼𝗲𝗯𝗯𝗲𝗹𝘀 𝗔𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝘆 𝗔𝗻𝘁𝗶-𝗡𝗮𝘇𝗶 𝗪𝗶𝘁  Comedians Banned For Humorous Remarks on Leaders  BERLIN, Feb. 4 (U.P.) When Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels yesterday blasted Germany's cafe society, he called it "society rabble and intellectual snobs," for laughing at comedians who make Nazi leaders the butts of their jokes.  Goebbels turned his anger upon the "society rabble" after announcing that five German actors had been banned from the stage for publicly ridiculing Nazi party and state functionaries.  He denied that there was any lack of humor in Nazi Germany, but said that it must be kept "good-natured, decent and clean."  "There is plenty of humor in Germany, more than enough," he said in a three and one-half column editorial in the Nazi party's newspaper Voelkischer Beobachter . "But we do not permit ourselves to be ridiculed."  Th...