Peddlers, jackhammers, whistles: Historian Emily Thompson lets you hear the sounds of life in 1920s New York City
By Brett Tomlinson from the December 4, 2013, issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly Peter Murphy In her freshman seminar, Emily Thompson (Princeton Graduate School ’92) plays records on old phonographs to provide an authentic sound. The streets of New York City in the late 1920s featured a cacophony of sounds — some old, many new. […]
The Intricate Makeshift Money Germans Relied On Between World Wars
From gizmodo.com: State-issued currency is the scaffolding upon which capitalism was built, but it’s always been prone to mayhem. For instance in 1920s Germany, extreme inflation forced German businesses to actually print millions of their own customized paper bills. Now largely forgotten, this notgeld, or “emergency money,” was once ubiquitous—amounting to an ornately-decorated I.O.U. in […]