Rosie the Riveter’s Texas Cousins–and a Piece of Big News at the End!

Rosie the Riveter entered the American imagination in 1942 in a song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb which celebrated a tireless factory worker and her riveting gun.* Artists quickly picked up the image for patriotic posters, the best known being J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It” poster for Westinghouse Electric. But Rosie…

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The War Magician

I was well into David Fisher’s The War Magician: How an Illusionist Changed the Course of World War II before I realized that it was a novel based on a true story rather than a work of historical non-fiction. The confusion was mine. The cover clearly states that the story is “based on an extraordinary…

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“Farmerettes” Fed the Nation at War

In the fall of 1917, manpower was short in the fields of America. When the United States entered the Great War, millions of men had left farm work to join the army or do other war-related jobs. Even with farm labor wages skyrocketing, farmers faced difficulties hiring men to harvest the crops that were needed…

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