John Strausbaugh

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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. A century of atrocities, a century of savages.  A hundred years of holocaust. This is the world after the end of the world. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. Cummings, Buckminster Fuller, Edgar Varese. Even Kahlil Gibran, who wrote The Prophet there. 

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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 least a temporary home in the 20th century. Some came as refugees, but most were self-exiles who came because this tiny speck of real estate, a neighborhood they could stroll through in twenty minutes, was the one place in America where they were not only allowed but encouraged to live and express themselves freely.

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Country singer-songwriter Roger Miller was best known for his do-wacka-do hits, but like other novelty stars, he had hidden depths.