Déjà Vu All Over Again: Zoom-Bombing 1930’s Style

  Like most of us, I had not heard about “Zoom bombing” until the Covid pandemic caused many of us to take our social and work lives to the internet. As the use of Zoom and its fellows grew, so did the intrusion of internet trolls into online video conference spaces. Disruptions have ranged from…

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Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Bonus Expeditionary Forces March on Washington

And while we’re talking about failures of compassion and the Great Depression, as I believe we were, consider the example of the Bonus Expeditionary Forces’ march on Washington—a story with uncomfortable modern-day echoes Bonus payments to World War I veterans were a hot political subject in the years after 1919. Congress passed bills approving bonuses…

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Wrapping My Head Around the Weimar Republic, Pt 3: May Day, 1929

If I had more self-discipline, I would wait and tell this story in chronological order, after several other stories from the Weimar Republic that already have a place in my blog post editorial calendar.* But I found this story absolutely amazing when I read it over the course of several days’ articles in the Chicago…

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