Send us a text Al Smith, King Kong, Donald Trump, and the Empire State Building #johnstrausbaugh #kingkong #donaldtrump #empirestatebuildingAv John Strausbaugh

Send us a text In 1966, Jimi Hendrix – who was then still an obscure musician going as Jimmy James -- wandered into a club near Times Square called the African Room. On stage he saw a tall, muscular black man in a black leotard, boots with eight-inch heels, and a spider monkey on his shoulder, doing a voodoo-inspired dance in front of a rock band. …

Send us a text Ronald Reagan was the first television celebrity to become President. That was quite remarkable in the 1980s, when no one knew what the 21st Century would bring. A handful of rehearsed poses, he was less the country's leader than its logo. #Reagan #Trump #history #presidency #election #WhiteHouse #celebrity #politics #JohnStrausbaugh…

Send us a text Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was one of the oddest characters in Greenwich Village in the 1910s. Her bizarre outfits and outlandish behavior were legendary. Was she just a troubled eccentric, or a pioneering feminist and artist? An excerpt from my book, "The Village." #BaronessElsa #GreenwichVillage #MarcelDuchamp #WilliamCa…

Send us a text In the 1920s and 1930s, the Russian émigré Nicholas Roerich was one of the most famous painters in America. His work was shown around the country, and widely praised. The art was only part of Roerich’s appeal. His occult side drew not just fans, but disciples. They funded extraordinary missions in the East, searching for the mystical…

Send us a text In the 20th century, nudists and publications about nudism were subject to all sorts of censorship and legal harassment. Nudist magazine publishers went to great lengths to avoid obscenity charges, which led, sadly, to some unintentionally hilarious results. #nudism #nudist #obscenity #censorship #nudistmagazine #history #pornography…

Send us a text In 1956, the pioneering radio host Jean Shepherd orchestrated one of the great literary hoaxes of all time, the saucy novel "I, Libertine." #hoax #JeanShepherd #libertine #GreenwichVillage #radio #TheodoreSturgeon #KellyFreas #MadMagazine #JohnCassavetes #AChristmasStoryAv John Strausbaugh

Send us a text Gazing at the faces of Guanajuato's famous mummies can make you wonder what kind of expression you'll wear when you face death. #Mexico #mummies #Guanajuato #Mexicanwrestler #Santo #RayBradbury #OctavioPaz #deathAv John Strausbaugh

Send us a text In the 1920s and 30s, Benito Mussolini and his Fascists enjoyed broad popularity in America. Like certain political figures today, he was seen as a "strongman" who brought order to Italy and was a bulwark against the spread of international bolshevism. But one Italian anarchist in New York City was virulently anti-Fascist -- Carlo Tr…

Send us a text On the morning of October 12, 1964, a drab green bus pulled up near a launchpad at the Soviet spaceport called the Baikonur Cosmodrome in bleak and dreary Kazakhstan. The door opened and three small men in soft white aviator caps and what looked like wool leisure suits stepped down. They were dressed more for a cruise ship than a spa…

Send us a text On Sunday, December 7, 1941, news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor began to reach New Yorkers in the middle of the afternoon. In the Brill Building, America's pop songwriters went to war that very day. They reacted to Pearl Harbor with instant fury and patriotic zeal, churning out hundreds of war songs at a ferocious clip. An e…

Send us a text The Soviets put the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, into space 61 years ago, on June 16, 1963. They did it to beat the Americans at it. Having done that, it was another 20 years before the next female cosmonaut flew... An excerpt from my book, "The Wrong Stuff." https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-s…

Send us a text An excerpt from my book The Wrong Stuff. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-stuff/9781541703346/Av John Strausbaugh

Send us a text In 1959, in the basement of a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Richard and Dorothea Tyler founded an avant-garde artists’ collective and funeral society called the Uranian Phalanstery and First New York Gnostic Lyceum Temple. The Tylers were influential underground figures in postwar New York City culture. They connected…

Send us a text Throughout World War II, Wall Street banks and giant American corporations traded with the Nazis and Japanese and played both sides in the war. They included Chase National Bank, Standard Oil, DuPont, and General Motors, among others. The impulse to prosecute them as traitors for their financial dealings with the Nazis and Japanese w…

Send us a text Sixty-three years ago, on April 12 1961, Yuri Gagarin fell out of the sky. He was the first human to go to outer space. He almost didn't make it back alive. In their "space race" against the well-heeled Americans, the Soviets rushed their scientists, cut corners, and were very careless with their cosmonauts' lives. Gagarin was a luck…

Send us a text Zombie apocalypse. AI annihilating us. Killer asteroids. Godzilla's comeback. War, plague, famine, crime. Why are we so obsessed with apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic scenarios? Maybe we're unconsciously but very publicly acknowledging the fact that the apocalypse isn't coming, it already happened. The world ended in the 20th century…

Send us a text In the years leading up to World War 2, New York's pro-Hitler German American Bund had their own summer camp on Long Island, Camp Siegfried. NOTE: I do not own this image.Av John Strausbaugh

Send us a text During World War 2, “zoot suit” was synonymous with “juvenile delinquent.” What the black leather jacket and the hoodie have been to later generations, the zoot suit was to the World War 2 years.Av John Strausbaugh

Send us a text The coming of World War 2 politicized an illustrator who’d previously been known only for wacky advertisements and surrealist children’s books. His name was Theodor Geisel, but he's universally known as Dr. Seuss. NOTE: I do not own this image.Av John Strausbaugh

Send us a text The New York House of Detention for Women -- aka the House of D -- had a number of star visitors, including Angela Davis. NOTE: I do not own this image.Av John Strausbaugh

Send us a text W. R. Burnett isn't quite as well known as other crime writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but the titles of several of his novels and films – Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle -- everybody knows.Av John Strausbaugh

Send us a text Greenwich Village enjoyed its last great flowering as the bohemian capital of America from the years following World War 2 through the 1970s. It still drew pilgrims and exiles from around the world. Among them were a bounty of creative geniuses who made the neighborhood a whirring dynamo of culture.…

Send us a text By the 1910s the whole world seemed to know that Greenwich Village was the Left Bank of America. It was familiar enough that P.G. Wodehouse could poke fun at it in a Broadway musical. Its crooked streets and romantic garrets drew the likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Eugene O'Neill, E. E. Cum…

Send us a text Greenwich Village was a Mecca for misfits and refuge for outsiders for a very long time. Blacks, Italians and Irish, artists across the genres, anarchists and communists, gays and lesbians, intellectuals, eccentrics, visionaries and life's adventurers were all drawn there. An astonishing Who's Who of world culture made the Village at…

Send us a text Country singer-songwriter Roger Miller was best known for his do-wacka-do hits, but like other novelty stars, he had hidden depths.Av John Strausbaugh

Send us a text In the 1930s, Laura Ingalls was a stunt and race pilot about as famous as Amelia Earhart. But she became best known for something else -- her championing of Adolf Hitler.Av John Strausbaugh

Send us a text On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito went on Japanese radio, announcing the end of the war in the Pacific. An 86-year-old retired general, Shiba Goro, decided to commit seppuku, ritual suicide. That in itself isn’t especially noteworthy. Hundreds of Japanese officers at the time were deciding to follow the old samurai way of choosing…

Send us a text In August 1934, Dorothy Thompson was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, on Hitler’s direct order. She was on her way to being one of the most widely read, discussed, and argued about journalists of the era.Av John Strausbaugh

Send us a text Gherman Titov was the second Soviet cosmonaut to go into space, but the first one to visit America. Things didn't quite go as planned.Av John

Send us a text It was said that Maxwell Bodenheim was "more disliked, derided, denounced, beaten up, and kicked down more flights of stairs than any poet of whom I have heard or read." And that was said by a friend.Av John

Send us a text Before dawn on April 26, 1865, a detachment of the 16th New York Volunteer Cavalry found John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, holed up in a Virginia tobacco barn. They were under strict orders from the Secretary of War to take Booth alive. But one man who rode with the 16th answered to a higher authority: Sergeant Thomas “B…

Send us a text The 1939 New York World's Fair, projecting a future of peace and prosperity, opened in a world that was tilting into war. By the time it closed in 1940 the Fair, like the world, was in shambles.Av John

Send us a text On a sunny afternoon in 1939, the physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner visited Albert Einstein at his beach cottage on Long Island. They wanted him to write to President Franklin Roosevelt about the need to develop the atom bomb before the Nazis could.Av John

Send us a text Victoria Woodhull, the first female candidate for president of the United States, sat out the election in a jail cell. She achieved several firsts for women in America, yet her impact on the women's movement was so controversial, and in the end so negligible, that she's a minor figure in feminist history, but a fascinating one.…