Page 12 - Kate Smith News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Published in the new yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the nation among other outlets. In his cover essay on the invisible bridge for the New York Times book review this past sunday frank rich wrote, it says much about perlsteins gift as a historian that he persuasively portrays a silky splendor interlude between the fall of nixon and the rise of reagan as his subtitle has it. Not just as a true bottom of our history but also as a Rosetta Stone for reading america and its politics today. It says much about his talent as a writer that he makes years of lively engrossing and on...

Then upon her death left. It was opened as a Public Museum in 1963. We are now more than 50 years as an institution in washington, d. C. It is good to see all of you here tonight. Our program is entitled smile while you kiss me sad adieu. World war i songs. Let me introduce our speaker quickly. We like to remind people here that president wilson imagines a world at peace and proposed a plan to achieve that vision. That is a remarkable accomplishment when we take about it from the Vantage Point of our lives 100 years later. It is more remarkable if we transport ourselves back to his time and th...

The trip back in time. Were surrounded in this room by gifts of state that president wilson received. One of the reasons he received so many spectacular gifts, frankly, is first, because he was the First American president to go to europe while he was in office. But secondly, because the world so fervently hoped for him to succeed in the mission he had taken on, of ending the catastrophe that was world war i. I think its hard for us to think now about how shocking world war i was to the people who had to live through it. And so the music of that era, to that time. I think as youll see this aft...

And im not being snotty. It was a different kind of war. The people were not engaged by it. In vietnam, you had some songs, but theyre songs in which two groups are warring with one another. Give peace a chance, and whats the im an oaky from ma skokie. Iraq and afghanistan dont produce a lot of songs. Again, because in a way they were invisible, and in a way, we know about them, were not as a nation engaged in it. We dont have a citizen army anymore. That gets in the way of that. So in world war i, you have a mix. Really, in the middle between the two wars, and it shows. There were songs about...

So a more tip skal song is when you start getting into the intense, personal emotions. In the civil war, young men going off to war never having been away from home before. And the country was young. A lot of them farm boys. A lot of them immigrants. Arn awful lot of the union army spoke with an irish accent during the civil war. They really did fight a good parlt of that war. There are some sentimental ballots like aura lee which are songs of praise for an idealized young women. But thats as close as you come to it. In the civil war, theyre mainly about mom. And junior is writing a letter hom...