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Ok, so some things in the golden era were not too cool...

Story

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SUMTER, S.C. (AP) — A 14-year-old black boy executed nearly 70 years ago is finally getting another day in court, and his lawyers plan to argue Tuesday for a new trial, saying his conviction was tainted by the segregationist-era justice system and scant evidence.

George Stinney was found guilty in 1944 of killing two white girls, ages 7 and 11. The trial lasted less than a day in the tiny Southern mill town of Alcolu, separated, as most were in those days, by race.

Nearly all the evidence, including a confession that was central to the case against Stinney, has disappeared, along with the transcript of the trial. Lawyers working on behalf of Stinney's family have gathered new evidence, including sworn statements from his relatives accounting for his whereabouts the day the girls were killed and from a pathologist disputing the autopsy findings.

http://news.yahoo.com/trial-sought-sc-boy-14-executed-1944-172035983.html
 

1961MJS

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Hi

Check out

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrin_massacre

The "dozens of victims" was 23 total. Wikipedia doesn't note this, but the book on the subject "Bloody Williamson" mentions that those murdered were mostly Chicago mobsters. The blurb makes it sound like quite a few more. While the city was a little supportive of the massacre, it doesn't appear that all that many citizens took part. Most of Southern Illinois were either poor farmers or poor coal miners at that point in history.

Just another $0.02 and not really mine.

The UMW has had a long rough history. A Great Uncle was shot by the National Guard around the age of 18 because he was walking by a UMW Strike. My mother didn't know if his shooting was on purpose or an accident. He became a preacher instead of a coal miner like most of his relatives though.
 

Story

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L
ocal historian and author Scott Doody began the latest search for the gravesites in 2009. On the day I first met him, in March 2010, I found him excavating in a cemetery. The day was young, but soon proved unsuccessful. I commended him on his effort, for he had proved the null hypothesis—the massacre victims were not in said location. This was good, I explained, as he now knew where not to dig. My comment mistaken for sarcasm, scarcely did I know would I become involved in one of the greatest challenges of my life: to locate the victims of the 1922 Herrin Massacre.

http://www.pobonline.com/articles/97208-team-uses-scanning-to-uncover-herrin-massacre
 

Story

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pKWquCl.jpg


Grasshoppers like hot, dry weather. Some of the people who survived the 1930s on the plains have stories of how swarms of hoppers descended on them, eating entire fields and even farm implements and household items. Fields of corn or alfalfa or oats could be destroyed in hours. The grasshoppers would eat anything. The conventional wisdom was that hoppers liked salt, and so they would eat the shirt off your back, or wherever else sweat landed.

http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe30s/pests_02.html
 

Nobert

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Story, I feel like an idiot for asking, but that grasshopper is not real right?

Interjecting (pardon me), it's unlikely. There was a trend for novelty post cards that used photomontage to create images of people catching enormous fish or hauling gigantic vegetables and the like, and I suspect the above is of that ilk.
 

Nobert

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Not only have I read Clyde Fans, I started a thread about his wife's barber shop.

And yes I was kidding. This may be the only BBS where you could post that picture with the caption "photoshop" and everyone would get the joke.

All The Kings In Town Get Their Hair Cut At The Crown

http://www.thefedoralounge.com/show...Crown-Barber-Shop&highlight=crown+barber+shop

Yep, I saw that thread, that's how I knew you were aware of him. In fact, Seth's comics were one my major inroads to getting interested in early-mid 20th century stuff in the first place.

For those of you who are wondering what in Heck I'm talking about and how it relates, Seth is a cartoonist from Ontario whose drawing style and subject matter focus on what is referred to around here as the "Golden Era." His narrative Clyde Fans has a major character who is obsessed with those novelty postcards.
 

Story

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CHICAGO (AP) — An effort to scrub Eliot Ness's reputation as the federal lawman who brought down Al Capone came to Chicago's City Hall on Friday.

In a hearing that was unusual for focusing on events that played out 80 years ago, a city council committee voted to send a resolution to the full council next week that would urge federal lawmakers not to name a federal building in Washington, D.C., after the famed Prohibition agent.

"The notion that he put Al Capone behind bars is pure unadulterated Hollywood fiction," said Alderman Ed Burke, who has been pushing for the resolution ever since he heard about the proposal to name the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives headquarters after Ness.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/02/28/chicago-ness-undeserving-honor/5908711/
 

KILO NOVEMBER

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Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That sounds like a fun place to work.

Years ago I knew a sergeant on the Fairfax County Virginia police force. I got a lot of good cop stories from him. One involved a Fairfax County Police officer who quit the force to take a job with what was then known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. One night, my pal and his partner answered a call from one of the local paranoid schizophrenics, the kind with aluminum foil all over her apartment walls and windows. She called with a complaint that a nearby defense contractor was sending radio waves into he apartment to control her brain, and she demanded that the police get them to stop it.

My friend told her that this was out of their jurisdiction, but it was the purview of "The Bureau of Astronomy, Tobacco, and Firearms" and that the crazy lady was in luck because they knew a man who worked there and could help. They gave him the name and phone number of the former police officer and urged her to call him.

Cop humor.
 

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BERLIN (Kyodo) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping criticized Japan's wartime atrocities Friday, saying the Japanese military killed more than 300,000 people in Nanjing in 1937 when it occupied the Chinese city.

In a speech delivered in Berlin, Xi also said that over 35 million Chinese people were killed or injured as Japan waged a war of aggression stemming from militarism.

Xi's remarks are likely to spark criticism from Japan as Tokyo and Beijing have been at odds over the number of victims in the incident known as the Nanjing Massacre.

http://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Eco...000-in-1937-Nanjing-Massacre-Chinese-Pres.-Xi
 

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