Paul Luvera Journal

David Pietrusza has written 1920 – The year of The Six Presidents. His description of this interesting period of American history is very well written. Warren G. Harding is one of the historical figures he discusses. Harding was the 29th President from 1921 to 1923. He was a Republican Senator from Ohio. Even thought he appointed such distinguished people as Charles Evans Hughes, Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover to positions of importance his administration was so scandal ridden as to…

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Andrew Jackson was born in the backwoods of the Carolinas and he read the law to become a lawyer. He was an outstanding lawyer in Tennessee. He was a frontiersman who engaged in brawls and killed a man in a duel. He was the commander of American forces at the Battle of New Orleans and was known as "Old Hickory" for his toughness. He was the founder of the Democratic party He was the seventh president of the United State…

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Most of us are familiar with the famous "Ponzi scheme" a scam worked by Charles Ponzi in the 1900’s. Ponzi was an Italian immigrant who became famous for his swindles after immigrating in 1903. Standing only 5′ 2" tall, Ponzi had a gift of gab, enormous self confidence and a charming manner. After serving a prison term in Canada for forging checks he came back to the United States where he served time again for involvement in an illegal immigrant…

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The 1948 movie version of "Bonnie Prince Charlie" (1720 – 1788) staring David Niven is virtually all fiction. However, the historical facts are of interest at least in regard to the quality of loyalty. Charles Edward Stuart, known as "the young pretender" and "bonnie prince Charlie" was an exiled claimant to the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland living in Italy. He was the grandson of King James II who had been deposed in the revolution of 1688 and was…

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I enjoyed reading the book,Disaster at the Pole. It’s a story about Umberto Nobile, an Italian aeronautical engineer and pioneer in Arctic aviation. He had designed and built dirigibles for Italy during the Italo-Turkish war in 1912. The book is a discription of his historic flights in airships across the North Pole. Born in 1885 in Italy, he died in Rome in 1978. During his life he made two flights in balloons over the pole without landing on either flight….

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I received a Radio Spirits® catalog and had fun looking through it at the many old time radio broadcasts I used to listen to. People of my generation did not grow up watching television. There was no television to watch. Instead, we had the public library and the radio to listen to. I can remember radio broadcasts where I was totally absorbed in listening to Westerns, comedy, suspense and stories about action hero’s. Books were another wonderful source of entertainment….

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I am reading the book Edith’s Story by Edith Velmans about her experiences as Jew in Holland during World War II. During the German occupation, she adopted a new identity with forged papers and lived with a Protestant family in another town. It is a different story then that of Anne Frank and her family. The Frank family had hidden in a house of a Protestant family for two years until they were betrayed and arrested in 1944. Anne, age…

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Over 140 years ago Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, but there was another strange connection between the Lincoln family and the Booth family described best by Historynet.com, a history magazine publisher. Robert Todd Lincoln was the eldest of four sons and a student at Harvard. Edwin Booth was the second of three sons. Edward was seen as one the 19th’s century’s great Shakespearean actors. During the civil war Robert was traveling to Washington D.C. during a school…

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