Forward Looking Back
I love reading newspapers. Print and online. Big and small. One favorite is The Forward. (I started when they published the brilliant cartoonist Ben Katchor, and stayed hooked even after culture editor Alana Newhouse left to join Nextbook and oversee its development of the brilliant Tablet.)
Back to The Forward. One regular feature is worth the price of the paper - ForwardLookingBack, which reprints items from 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Much like Scientific American. Hoping the paper doesn’t mind an extended quote, here’s a great example from the current issue:
100 Years Ago in The Forward
“Jumping up onto a tabletop in the mess hall of Ellis Island, one of the immigrants yelled out: ‘No one could eat breakfast today. The food they give us here isn’t fit for pigs. We are treated here like wild animals, kept in cages and given rotting food to eat.’ The speaker, who recently had written a letter to the Forward regarding the poor conditions on Ellis Island, is one of those slated to be shipped back to Europe because he didn’t have the $25 now required to enter the United States. His speech made a deep impression on the rest of the immigrants, who decided to stop eating and start a hunger strike. The atmosphere frightened immigration officials, who must have thought that a revolution was in the works, so they sent guards into the mess hall with their revolvers drawn. Needless to say, this didn’t help the situation.”
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