[...] Hollywood’s silent screen stars faced a new peril with the coming of “talking motion pictures” – their recorded voices… Norma Talmadge, featured in Photoplay’s December 1929 cover story, “The Microphone–The Terror of The Studios,” was one of the casualties… The Pop History Dig story here features famous actors and directors who recount the difficulties of the silent-to-sound era, the carnage it created, and which Hollywood studios became the big players in its aftermath [...]

[...] Baseball great Babe Ruth and his wife Claire are shown in a 1938 Los Angeles Times newspaper ad for White Owl cigars. Ruth’s involvement with other tobacco advertising – cigarettes, pipe, and chewing tobacco – is also covered, with some advertising samples & photos. Ruth’s throat disease is also discussed…[...]

[...] In 1934 and 1935, American tennis star Ellsworth Vines did some advertising for the R.J Reynolds’ Camel cigarette brand. He was 23-24 years old, among the world’s best players, and had become a national sports celebrity, appearing on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine. Vines appeared in full-page magazine ads endorsing Camels both by himself and with other athletes, depicted in one as having a cigarette at the end of a tennis match [...]

[...] “Harlem Nocturne” is a saxophone-saturated song that has had a long shelf life. It first found fame in the late 1930s’ jazz and big band era…More than 20 years later, and again nearly 50 years after its first release, “Harlem Nocturne” found popular appeal – first in a sultry1959-1960 version by The Viscounts from New Jersey, and again in the 1980s’ as the signature crime show theme song for “The Mike Hammer” TV series… This story includes the full song and covers its history [...]

[...] In 1934, the General Mills Company began including pictures and testimonials of athletes on its “Wheaties” cereal boxes to help sell the cereal… The first sports figures to appear on the “Wheaties” cereal box – primarily on the package back or side panels until the 1950s – were baseball stars such as Lou Gehrig, Mel Ott, and Jimmie Foxx… Wheaties found that its sales climbed through the 1930s, helped by its cereal-box endorsements as well as its radio and magazine advertising….Sports stars endorsing “Wheaties” and other General Mills cereals would become a staple marketing strategy of General Mills through the 1930s and beyond [...]

[...] In 1928, Al Jolson, fresh from the fame of appearing in the first talking motion picture, “The Jazz Singer” of 1927, also began appearing in American Tobacco Co. cigarette advertising for their Lucky Strike brand… American Tobacco, and other tobacco companies, would soon make film-star and celebrity advertising of cigarette brands a staple in their tobacco promotion campaigns through the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond… This story covers some of that history [...]

[...] Vanity Fair magazine in the 1930s used its cover art and political caricature to spotlight President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) and the New Deal… In the process, some highly talented artists produced memorable covers from the depths of the Great Depression that have lasting value to this day… Some history of the early New Deal and FDR’s Administration are also covered [...]

Jimmie Foxx, 21 year-old baseball star of the Philadelphia Athletics, featured on Time magazine cover, July 29, 1929.     In the summer of 1929, the year in which the stock market crashed, America was a nation not expecting disaster.  These were, after all, the “Roaring Twenties” and America was feeling pretty good about itself.  A [...]

     It was December 1937 in Chicago.  The Washington Redskins professional football team had come to town to play the fearsome Chicago Bears in the National Football League championship game at Wrigley Field.  It was a bitterly cold day with frozen turf.  Washington, although a good team, wasn’t given much of a chance against “the [...]

In the 1930s, in the depths of the Depression, a new kind of economics began to emerge from an unlikely source: a cartoon character named Mickey Mouse and his animated friends. Mickey was the creation of a young Los Angeles-based artist named Walt Disney. …Not only would Disney’s creations help buoy a shaky American economy, they also helped build the foundation of something new — a global entertainment economy….

“The Grapes of Wrath” is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written by John Steinbeck in 1939. Not only was this book a landmark social commentary in its day and a major publishing success, it became an award-winning and profitable Hollywood film, and also inspired at least two rounds of music — one by Woody Guthrie in 1940 and another by Bruce Springsteen in the 1990s [...]