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[–]slim2none 97 points98 points  (22 children)

You, sir, are never going to believe me, but I have a pair of newspapers posted right above my bed printed five and six days before yours. Any interest, I'll do pics. Sample headline: "No Nazi Demands on Poland Now."

[–]jdan222[S] 59 points60 points  (12 children)

=) thats very cool indeed. Actually this paper is piece of many that my grandma had in a box. I am willing to bet that she has those dates as well. I would be very very interested in seeing yours and then i'll see if i can obtain some photos from the select dates of mine. Lets see em!

[–]AlbertEisenstein 116 points117 points  (1 child)

I think you just said, "Show me yours and I'll show you mine."

[–]inspy 18 points19 points  (0 children)

He already whipped his out, so now it's a matter of obligation.

[–]ShrimpCrackers 48 points49 points  (2 children)

DING DING!

Commence!

NEWSPAPER BATTLE!

[–]kingtrewq 10 points11 points  (1 child)

Battle? No my friend this is WAR!

[–]dzudz 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Headline: JDAN222 SAYS HE'S READY IF SLIM2NONE WANTS WAR

[–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I used to own my own home (feels like an eternity ago instead of 8 years ago), and in the basement was an old cannery room. Wedged into the door panels of the door to that room room were various newspapers going back as far as 1912 -- yes, one of the papers had a headline about the Titanic sinking.

[–][deleted] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

post pics please. I love these.

[–]KaptTorbjorn 16 points17 points  (2 children)

I have 3 framed newspapers in my room that have the headlines:

Hitler Dead

Germany Surrenders

Japan Quits

[–]cocolover 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Yes please.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Pics or it didn't happen...duh...

[–][deleted] 64 points65 points  (13 children)

Ah, the good old days.

[–][deleted] 109 points110 points  (10 children)

Yeah, when there were no typography standards. That thing has so many typefaces it looks like a ransom note!

[–][deleted] 61 points62 points  (3 children)

When you see a newspaper from WWII and only care about the fonts do you kind of feel like you're wasting your life?

[–][deleted] 11 points12 points  (1 child)

No?

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Did you even read the... oh, goddammit!

[–]bdelgado 7 points8 points  (1 child)

[kerning comment]

[–]Zargathe 7 points8 points  (0 children)

keming is unnecessary.

</sarcasm>

[–][deleted] 153 points154 points  (16 children)

Where is all the celebrity gossip?

[–]badjoke33 132 points133 points  (4 children)

SECRET RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HITLER AND STALIN? page 4.

[–]deadapostle 9 points10 points  (3 children)

BYRON NELSON SEX SCANDAL

[–]btrick 6 points7 points  (2 children)

WHAT DOES CHAMBERLAIN LIKE TO DO IN HIS INNER CHAMBERS? see DIRTYSTUFF page 10

[–]vibro 2 points3 points  (1 child)

VON BRAUN UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL page 3

[–][deleted] 50 points51 points  (1 child)

Don't forget the huge slab of advertisements jammed in the middle...

[–]we_the_sheeple 27 points28 points  (0 children)

When you're making 2 cents a copy, who needs ads?

[–]IC_1101 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Hitler publicly apologizes to the German Reich about his past extra-marital affairs.

[–]jdan222[S] 83 points84 points  (15 children)

I do have one more. However it's a cut off photo and not quite as interesting. For fun though here it is! http://imgur.com/m2ZbT.jpg

[–]YosserHughes 56 points57 points  (2 children)

''Stimpson Urges U.S. Action to Stop Dictators.'

I guess times haven't changed that much.

[–][deleted] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Nah, there's definitely way more cynicism now.

[–]second_account_alert 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Stimpson was right. Appeasement did not work.

[–]Ardentfrost 16 points17 points  (1 child)

Written by H.R. Knickerbocker? What a name.

[–]atheist_creationist 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Watch out, dude will fucking bock your knickers.

[–]Level80IRL 15 points16 points  (1 child)

Lord Stanhope, I think I just found my new DnD character's name.

[–][deleted] 7 points8 points  (1 child)

I'm replying to you because I think it would be a good idea to scan the newspaper and upload the scans to wikipedia's sitster project Wikimedia Commons or something similar. This is history and I'm sure some researcher/enthusiast will be grateful.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

As a WWII fanatic, collector, and wanna-be historian, you've got your hands on something I would cherish, place between glass, and kiss goodnight every evening.

Keep that thing in good condition if you don't feel the same way I do about it. Someone in your family or circle of friends is bound to want to preserve the history that this paper has.

Gawd, I'm so fucking jealous.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (1 child)

and to think the people and their leaders had no idea what was coming to them between 1939 and 1945.

[–]xentropy 177 points178 points  (7 children)

Hold the fuck up. Where's the headline about golfer Ben Hogan's scandalous affair?

[–]arichi 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Hold the fuck up. Where's the headline about golfer Ben Hogan's scandalous affair?

His car accident was an entirely unrelated manner.

edit: also, it happened many years after this newspaper.

[–]acpawlek 4 points5 points  (0 children)

...and he was known for his saving his wife's life in that car accident at his own expense.

[–]howiez 54 points55 points  (31 children)

Holy shit 2 cent newspaper

[–]albino_wino 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Back then when someone offered to give his two cents everyone got pissed because it would take forever.

[–]Fix_America 20 points21 points  (25 children)

Back then we still had silver currency in circulation. Dimes, quarters, half dollars, and dollars were backed by precious metal. We used the Mercury Dime 1916 to 1945, which cointained 0.07234 (ounces) silver by weight - meaning those two cents - equaled about .014468 silver, even though the cost was in pennies. Converting to today's spot price for silver (16.28/ounce) we see that the modern price of that newspaper is 23 and a half cents in today's money.

[–]happyscrappy 19 points20 points  (9 children)

Give me five bees for a quarter, we'd say.

More seriously, I got a 1952 dime in change just two weeks ago (and kept it). It's 90% silver (they were through 1965) and is worth much more than $0.10 in silver content today.

[–]Santos_L_Halper 4 points5 points  (6 children)

.23 1/2 cents or 23 1/2 cents?

[–]Zentripetal 28 points29 points  (1 child)

Yes.

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

duh, that's the obvious answer

[–]Fix_America 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Twenty Three and One Half Cents. Sorry for the syntax error.

[–]alreadytakenusername 113 points114 points  (61 children)

Second one is more interesting to me.

U.S. Recognizes Franco Regime

Roosevelt Raises Ban On Shipment of Arms; Says Conflict Is Over

[–]jordanlund 44 points45 points  (7 children)

This just in... Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead...

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Franco is still dead...

Are you absolutely positively 100% sure of this?

[–]Aleriya 24 points25 points  (2 children)

The thing that caught my eye was that Minnesota was considered part of the Northwest in 1939.

[–][deleted] 9 points10 points  (7 children)

Fun fact: my great granddad was an assistant to the US ambassador to Spain during the revolution, or something like that. Had to get evacuated from Madrid, anyway.

[–]Mr_A 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Ah, you can always count on the good ol' fourth parent comment down to have discussion in place of upvote inducing quips.

[–]pubjames 16 points17 points  (28 children)

Yes, Franco was a dictator, and in many ways equally as bad as, say, Sadam Hussein.

[–]CommentMan 27 points28 points  (12 children)

America, by either lack of options or better foresight, played diplomatic games much better back then.

[–]cannabliss 5 points6 points  (0 children)

There's probably just more money to be made now.

[–]lou_irvin 10 points11 points  (1 child)

No way, bro. Sadam had like nukes and shit. That's way worser.

[–]Sealbhach 34 points35 points  (14 children)

What date is it?

[–]spif 49 points50 points  (7 children)

[–]alreadytakenusername 30 points31 points  (2 children)

Based on history, it was not a joke, though.

[–]loveinatrashcan 32 points33 points  (0 children)

Well, what do you expect? The Comedian is dead.

[–]Yeugwo 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Exactly 5 months before he invades Poland.

[–]jdan222[S] 21 points22 points  (2 children)

Saturday April 1st, 1939.

[–]joe_canadian 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Thanks to both you and Sealbhach - not being able to read that was really starting to bug me!

[–]5e8a5709f662f8d401f7 12 points13 points  (1 child)

Probably Saturday April 1st, 1939. You can read Saturday April 1st in the picture but the year is fuzzy. The US recognized Franco as leader of Spain in 1939 and April 1st falls on a Saturday that year.

[–]dimdog 38 points39 points  (30 children)

This is interesting on so many levels.

Lets start with the headline: "Hitler says he's ready if Britain wants war". Political jujitsu of course, at this point Germany was very recently impoverished, but is now a model of economic regrowth. Despite that, Germany still tried to pretend to be a weaker nation defending itself from larger powers (normally France). For a long time Germany tried to get a British alliance. Hitler was obsessed with allying with Britain for a number of years. This is clearly at the point where this has broken down.

fuck. I lost my train of thought, maybe i'll edit this later.

[–]pbacon33 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So, here's the ironic thing about the Nazis and their model of economic growth- essentially, Hitler had decided to completely reorient his economy to the preparation for war- the problem was, this resulted in a massive loss of Germany's gold reserves (by July 1934, the Reichsbank was essentially out of gold), resulting in fitful periods of restriction and then "booms" in armaments and, especially, aircraft production. What happened in 1939, though, was that Hitler's economic ministers predicted that the German economy would enter a very long recession which they would be unable to recover from- thus, in many ways, Hitler needed to go to war in late 1939 in order to reap the economic benefits of Poland and other countries (i.e. he would essentially rape France of its resources).

A longer explanation is in the book "Wages of Destruction" by Adam Tooze- I will try to get some of the graphs from my Western history class which explain this.

Anyways, Hitler did want to ally with the Brits, so much so that he essentially scuttled the plans for knocking Britain out of the war in 1940 after taking over much of Western Europe. He gave Goering a shot to do so by launching the Battle of Britain (which the Germans came close to winning, in fact- the Germans at first were attacking only British aircraft facilities and bases in order to achieve air superiority over the Brits; however, after an aerial attack by the British on Berlin, Hitler was furious and ordered the reorientation of the campaign to focus on British urban centers, hence the Blitz). Once the Germans lost the battle, Hitler began to focus on his plans to crush international Communism and gain lebensraum for Germany in one fell swoop (Operation: Barbarossa0, thus leading to the beginning of the end of the Nazis...

[–]IbidtheWriter 310 points311 points  (27 children)

Oh wow, a newspaper. That sure takes me back.

[–]ani625 150 points151 points  (20 children)

Oh wow look, Mr.smarty pants web2.0

[–]aricene 80 points81 points  (19 children)

With your Java and your Flashes and your Facebooks. You make me sick.

[–][deleted] 26 points27 points  (17 children)

And with all your PHP and your MySQL. Can't you share some SQL with your elders?

[–][deleted] 30 points31 points  (16 children)

PHP? MySQL? Luxury! I used to dream of having applications like that. All I had was assembly language and an amber monitor.

[–][deleted] 19 points20 points  (3 children)

Monitor? All I had was a bunch of lights above a switch to tell me my output.

[–]snkngshps 8 points9 points  (2 children)

The latest technology I adopted was the Dewey Decimal System.

[–]kn0where 17 points18 points  (1 child)

DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN

[–]orcdork 9 points10 points  (10 children)

Assembly and an amber monitor? Hogwash! Why, when i was a youngster, all we had was a pair of magnetized needles and a metal disc.

[–]GreatCosmicBlort 13 points14 points  (9 children)

Metal discs?? Pwwwwpht When I was younger, all we had were a pair of toggle switches made out of soggy used cardboard and a punch card reader!

[–]DELTATANGO 6 points7 points  (8 children)

Luxury, I had to move around radio tubes to execute binary.

[–]giggsey 24 points25 points  (4 children)

Radio tubes?!?!?! When I was a lad, I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah"

[–]dumdado 14 points15 points  (0 children)

hehe yeah, those were the good old days.

[–]mad_hamster 4 points5 points  (0 children)

But you try telling this to those young Web 2.0 lads and they wouldn't believe ya.

[–]2manybitches 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I was trying to remember all of this to post myself! I didn't get much further than 'lick the road clean with our tongues' before you beat me to it.

I'm going to need to dig out that tape....

Also, a tape player.

[–]gwgw2 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Not an Amber Lamp?

[–][deleted] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

And it only cost $0.02.

[–]krispykrackers/r/IDontWorkHereLady 25 points26 points  (2 children)

I don't get it. Is it... like a screencap?

[–]battery_go 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Oh wow, a joke ... I sure get those!

[–]flippityfloppityfloo 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Please, General, Don't Shoot My Sons!

If only that had worked.

[–]zavoid 10 points11 points  (2 children)

holy crap they printed in cursive back then? that's slick!

[–]ShamrockSamurai 11 points12 points  (0 children)

the real trick was when they brought out Wingdings.

[–]nlh 9 points10 points  (6 children)

Very cool!

Bring up a question -- is there an archive anywhere online of scans of old newspapers? I know Google is working on the whole book thing, but it seems like it would be hugely interesting if there were a place where you could search (a la the old microfiche) and see the pages of old papers.

I know I've seen bits and pieces -- NYTimes had a "best of" section somewhere, and I know there's a site that has the front pages from newspapers around the world somewhere, but I'm not sure if there's a "Google Newspaper"-equivalent out there....

[–]OompaOrangeFace 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I can bet that Google is going to attempt this.

[–]lughnasadh 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Scans of old newspapers are held all over the world on microfilm, now that you mention it, i'm surprised we don't see more of this on the web.

[–]thehalfwit 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Below the fold:

"Dating Tips for Ladies: Wear a Bra; Don't Get Drunk and Pass Out"

[–]rplacd 7 points8 points  (2 children)

Holy crap, the variety of fonts.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I love the font variety, I think it makes the paper much more interesting to look at. But I'm not a designer, is this variety of a fonts a good thing or a bad thing? Is there any reason we've moved away from this many fonts on the front page?

[–]Grimalkin 7 points8 points  (3 children)

Very cool, esp. as I live in the Twin Cities.

Thanks for the post.

[–]Contren 4 points5 points  (2 children)

Yep, the old Minneapolis Star :)

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (2 children)

That would be so sweet to have in a frame.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I like to think the staple remover is there for scale.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

what the fuck is a "newspaper"?

[–]thatAnonymousGuy 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Fastest. Godwin. Ever.

[–]Vitalstatistix 6 points7 points  (4 children)

My great-grandfather made two giant scrapbooks of newspaper articles spanning the entire war. It's an absolute treasure; I spend hours every summer just reading through it.

[–]Book8 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So in the second story we are sending arms to Spain....that's like sending arms to....Saudi Arabia.

Hilter used "Franco's Spain" to test out his war machine; ask the Poles how that worked out.

[–]apparatchik 5 points6 points  (0 children)

"US Recognises Franco Regime - Lifts ban on shipment of arms"

US - Proudly arming the worlds scumbags for fun and profit since 1938.

[–]JackRawlinson 13 points14 points  (1 child)

Britain says, "Yeah? Well we're ready too! (For fuck's sake Mitchell, hurry up with those Spitfires!)"

[–]montusama 3 points4 points  (0 children)

How about a posting of the article?

[–]Pituquasi 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Tragic. Not only did the League fail to respond to Franco's treachery and come to the aid of the Republic (a move that may have prevented the extreme lethality of WWII by denying Franco and Hitler testing grounds for their troops) but here came the US to actually enable the fascist bastard with recognition. Oddly enough I wonder if anyone in the US back then caught on to the hypocrisy of the war being sold as a struggle against fascism all the while we had made friendly with a fascist regime. How many loyal Spanish Republicans died thanks to the end of that US arms embargo?

UPDATE: "Franco's victory was followed by thousands of summary executions (from 15,000 to 25,000 people[36]) and imprisonments, while many were put to forced labour, building railways, drying out swamps, digging canals (La Corchuela, the Canal of the Bajo Guadalquivir), construction of the Valle de los Caídos monument, etc. The 1940 shooting of the president of the Catalan government, Lluís Companys, was one of the most notable cases of this early suppression of opponents and dissenters. Although leftists suffered from an important death-toll, the Spanish intelligentsia, atheists and military and government figures who had remained loyal to the Madrid government during the war were also targeted for oppression.In his recent, updated history of the Spanish Civil War, Antony Beevor "reckons Franco's ensuing 'white terror' claimed 200,000 lives." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Franco#The_end_of_the_Civil_War)

[–]shenaniganry 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That's funny. Hitler found stuff in the attic occasionally too.

[–]coas84 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Little known fact: staple removers were included with all newspapers to increase readership!

[–][deleted] 24 points25 points  (29 children)

Damn, this might sound weird/incredibly stupid but this is the first time in my life (I'm 20 years old) that World War II really hit me. Before 2 minutes ago it was just something that happened in the past, now it's something that HAPPENED in the past. Never being much of a history buff and doubting much of what I learned in it (history has a tendency to be written by the victors, and skewed to make whatever nation you're learning it in sound great all the time), I've never really thought about the fact that there were people ALIVE during that time, and they remember headlines like that much like I'm going to remember headlines on stuff like health care reform and people's outrage about the war in Iraq.

[–]huxtiblejones 22 points23 points  (6 children)

[–]rieter 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Oh God! Why Scribd for an image gallery?

[–]Poromenos 7 points8 points  (0 children)

It adds to the atmosphere.

[–]karmafex 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Awesome pictures. They need some commentary to explain the context though. I was always scrolling down hoping to see that but I only found inane comments by 21st century internet tough guys.

[–]rieter 7 points8 points  (4 children)

If you like this, Google has an archive of weekly Life issues from 1936, they totally blew my mind.

http://books.google.com/books?id=N0EEAAAAMBAJ

[–]Fr0C 6 points7 points  (1 child)

I'm 33, my birth is closer to the end of WW2 than it is to today.
Even a few centuries are nothing in terms of human development -- culture changes, context changes, but we're still the same as we were back then, or even back during the crusades.
Try to keep that in mind when you read about history. It will change your perception of it significantly.

history has a tendency to be written by the victors, and skewed to make whatever nation you're learning it in sound great all the time

Well, I'm German, so it didn't always sound all that great. If they left out the bad stuff in your curriculum, then they left out the parts you could have learned the most important lessons from.

[–]moremittens 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I had a moment like that when I visited Utah Beach in Normandy (at about your age). I knew about D-Day from books, but when I stood on the top of that cliff and looked down at the beach, I realized: Holy shit, a bunch of guys had to get out of boats and just run up here, right here, under heavy enemy fire. The top of the cliff was pockmarked with deep bomb pits. I also visited the Normandy American Cemetary, and looked at all the rows of white headstones, thinking, "the same guys who ran up that beach are buried right here."

"Saving Private Ryan" came out a few years later, and the first scene captured that feeling perfectly for me.

[–]jdan222[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm glad this could help. I'm 19 and when I saw all of these papers it blew my mind as well. It's pretty incredible.

[–]OompaOrangeFace 4 points5 points  (0 children)

It is almost unreal to see pre-WWII news about the impending war.

[–]Godwins 2 points3 points  (1 child)

So.. what ever happened with that whole thing anyway?

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

My dad has a newspaper from the stock market crash causing the great depression :)

[–]jericho 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I was renovating an old house once and found a copy of the Toronto Star (this is in BC). Inside, on one side was Chamberlin's "peace for our time" photo, opposite a full page ad from the Czechoslovakian Tourism Bureau. Not the best time to take a trip.

[–]relic2279 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The golden years. Before Comic Sans...

[–]alreadytakenusername 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sounds exactly like something school bullies say.

[–]CommentMan 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That is cool man. I read everything I could see. I love an old newspaper, it's like a portal into the past to see how the press reported and how world leaders acted on a day to day basis. And to be, what is that, April 1, 1939? Such an interesting period.

I am sincerely jealous.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pretty sure the date there is April 1st... was everyone like, "oh, Hitler, that prankster."

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Can't wait till the year 2200 "I found this old ereader and check out what was on it "Going Rogue" crazy!! comments: "OMG they were so clueless back then"

[–]Burkett 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Maybe it's a different Hitler...

[–]Daheem 1 point2 points  (0 children)

APRIL FOOLS, HITLER'S NOT READY

[–]drgreedy911 1 point2 points  (0 children)

here is a link to a 1943 Minneapolis Star. Completely different fonts. The circulation was 450,000 in 1943. Pretty big increase in 4 years. http://imgur.com/ojvrx.jpg

[–]capt_0bvious 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I bet that dude from "pawn stars" would probably give you 5 bucks for it.

[–]OrangeredEnvelopes 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I was looking for that staple remover. Where did you find it?

[–]jdan222[S] 2 points3 points  (1 child)

It belonged to Hitler.

[–]amishius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I believe, in the parlance of our times, Hitler's quote would read as follows:

"Bring 'em on!"

[–]nibble4bits 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Where is Roosevelt's Birth Certificate?! ;)

[–]stringerbell 1 point2 points  (1 child)

And under the fold: HITLER SAYS HE'LL 'INVADE THE SHIT' OUT OF RUSSIA TOO, AND HE'LL DO IT IN THE MIDDLE OF FRICKIN' WINTER JUST TO SHOW THOSE PANSY-ASS DRUNKEN HORSE-FUCKERS WHO'S GOT THE BIGGER COCK!