Uncle Sam

WWI recruiting poster by James Montgomery Flagg

12 August 2024

[14 August 2024: added reference to Samuel Adams]

The United States government is often referred to as Uncle Sam, who is rendered pictorially as a white-haired, goateed man wearing a suit and top hat that are adorned with the stars and stripes. Perhaps, the most famous image of Uncle Sam is James Montgomery Flagg’s WWI recruiting poster, but Uncle Sam was not the creation of Flagg. The term predates Flagg’s poster by over a century.

The term is a play on the initials U.S., making the government into an uncle, an older, masculine authority figure, stern but caring.

The earliest known use of Uncle Sam is in a 7 June 1803 letter by Robert Orr, a master armorer at the armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. In the letter to his son, Orr mentions that:

I expect to go to New Haven Next Week to inspect armes Made by Ely Whitney for Unkel Sam 500

The number 500 is likely a reference to the number of rifles to be inspected.

Another early use is in the journal of Isaac Mayo, a midshipman on the USS Wasp. In the 24 March 1810 entry, Mayo writes of nearly losing his footing and going overboard in rough seas:

24 [March] weighed anchor stood down the harbour, passed Sandy Hook, where there are two light-houses, and put to sea, first and second day aut most deadly seasick, oh could I have got on shore in the hight of it, I swear that Uncle Sam, as they call him, would certainly forever have lost the services of at least one sailor — ordered aloft by Capt L, when I could not keep my feet on deck, about to remonstrate but as usual in such cases, came of only second best.

These two uses show that Uncle Sam was reasonably common in US military and naval slang in the opening years of the nineteenth century. But the term did not come into widespread use outside of government service until the War of 1812. A letter in Vermont’s Bennington News-Letter on 23 December 1812 complains of the toll conscription was taking on the town:

The expence to this town, or more properly to the unfortunate individuals who were drafted, cannot be less than from two to three thousand dollars, exclusive to the expence the U. States of pay, clothing, rations &c. Now Mr. Editor—pray if you can inform me, what single solitary good thing will, or can acrue [sic] to (Uncle Sam) the U. S. for all the expence, marching and countermarching, pain, sickness, death &c. among us? What was the object to be obtained by it?

And Massachusetts’s Salem Gazette has this from 30 April 1813:

He confirms a great part of the statements before published. The troops proceeded about 20 miles a day, and might have marched on foot, much farther—Says many received little or nothing; but that his horses were taken into the camp, and fairly appraised, so that “Uncle Sam,” (as the soldiers say) might be chargeable in case they died in service.

But I have found what might possibly be an even earlier precursor to Uncle Sam. It is the use of Sam, sans Uncle, in a poem published in a Tory newspaper, the Royal Gazette, in British-occupied New York City on 22 January 1780. The poem, titled Mary Cay, is an allegory of the American Revolution up to that date, meant to be sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle. In the poem, Sam represents the rebellious elements in the colonies. The fourth through sixth stanzas of the poem read:

IV. For Molly counted full thirteen,
   And bundled now with Sammy,
Who said she ought to be a Queen,
   And never mind her Mammy.
V. So Sam an[d] Moll together plot,
   To make a stout resistance,
And from the school, in short, they got
   Some truants for assistants.
VI. Then mother call’d for Dick and Will
   To teach the wench her duty,
They drubb’d her now and then, but still
   They coax’d her as a beauty.

In the poem, thirteen-year-old Molly is the American colonies, her mother is, of course, England, and Dick and Will are Richard and William Howe, the brothers who commanded British forces in North America. Later in the poem are allegorical references to the battle of Bunker Hill, the entry of France into the war, and the dismissal of the Howe brothers.

The question is whether this use of Sam is an early form of Uncle Sam, if it is a reference to Samuel Adams, a well-known advocate for American independence, or if it is just a common name chosen at random. If uses of Sam in this fashion can be found that date to between 1780 and 1803, those would argue strongly in favor of it being a precursor. But at the moment, it is just a tantalizing possibility and that the Sam in the poem is an allegory for Samuel Adams would be the most likely reading.

Uncle Sam has also generated its share of etymythologies. The most famous is that the term comes from Samuel Wilson, a U.S. government inspector of provisions purchased for the troops during the War of 1812. Allegedly Wilson would stamp the casks he inspected with the letters U.S., which some wags took to be a reference to “Uncle Sam” Wilson. Even if the facts are true, it is not the origin as examples of Uncle Sam predate the war by some years.

Another legend is that the U.S. Army unit, formed in 1808, the United States Light Dragoons, or U.S.L.D., went by the nickname Uncle Sam’s Lazy Dogs. But like the Samuel Wilson explanation, the 1803 Orr letter disproves this as the origin of the phrase.

And there is also a claim that a version of the song Yankee Doodle from c. 1789 contains a reference to Uncle Sam in one of its stanzas. Putting aside the fact that the initials U.S. did not come into use until later, none of the versions containing the reference appear before 1824.

So it would seem that, for now at least, the 1803 Orr letter is the oldest known use of the phrase Uncle Sam, but it would have been in military slang use for some period before that.

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Sources:

A Conscript. Letter to the editor. Bennington News-Letter (Vermont), 23 December 1812, 3/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., s.v. Uncle Sam, n.1.

Hickey, Donald R. “A Note on the Origins of ‘Uncle Sam,’ 1810–1820.” New England Quarterly, 88.4, December 2015, 681–92. JSTOR.

“Impressments” (24 April 1813). Salem Gazette (Massachusetts), 30 April 1813, 4/1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Mary Cay.” Royal Gazette (New York), 22 January 1780, 3/3–4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Matthews, Albert. Uncle Sam. Worcester, Massachusetts: Davis Press, 1908, 61–63. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Mayo, Isaac. Entry for 24 March 1810. Private Journal at Sea from 1809 to 1819. Archive.org. Printed transcript by the USS Constitution Museum.

Orr, Robert. Letter to Hector Orr, 7 June 1803. Swann Auction Galleries, Sale 2600—Lot 240, 7 April 2022.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, s.v. Uncle Sam, n.

Popik, Barry. “Uncle Sam (summary).” Barrypopik.com, 14 November 2008 (revised sometime after 7 April 2022).

Image credit: James Montgomery Flagg, 1917. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

swiftboat

A swift boat patrolling a river in Vietnam, late 1960s

8 August 2024

To swiftboat a politician is to dishonestly call their former military service into question, to falsely accuse them of exaggerating or even lying about their combat experiences. The term arose in the context of the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, in which Democratic candidate John Kerry was a Vietnam veteran, while the Republican candidate, incumbent President George W. Bush, had sat out the war years in the Texas Air National Guard. Kerry had served aboard a U.S. Navy “swift boat.”

Swift boats were small—by Navy standards—shallow-draft vessels, suitable for river and coastal operations, deployed mainly in the Mekong River delta. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 movie Apocalypse Now features a swift boat. I’ve found a mention of “swift boat” in a photo caption in the January 1966 issue of the Navy magazine All Hands:

“SWIFT BOAT” is name [sic] given to the new PCF (patrol craft, fast) 50-footers which arrived in Vietnam recently as part of the Coastal Surveillance Force.

And there is this mention of swift boats in Memphis, Tennessee’s Commercial Appeal of 16 February 1966:

At sea, a 50-foot-long Allied naval patrol vessel known as a “swift boat,” was destroyed by an underwater mine in the Gulf of Siam and casualties to its six-man United States crew were described as “heavy.”

Earlier examples, especially in Navy documents, undoubtedly exist.

Apocalypse Now aside, swift boats largely disappeared from American consciousness following the war, that is until the 2004 presidential campaign. During the campaign Kerry naturally touted his war record, which compared very favorably to that of his opponent. To counter this, Republicans launched the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, consisting of some 250 men who had served on swift boats in Vietnam and who supported Bush’s reelection efforts. The group accused Kerry of lying about his war record, in particular about the incidents where he was wounded. But the group had only one member who had actually served with Kerry, and that man had not been present when Kerry was wounded. The other members of Kerry’s crew all supported his election. The group went public on 4 May 2004, as reported by the Los Angeles Times:

A newly formed group of Navy Vietnam War veterans has joined the political fray over Sen. John F. Kerry’s military experience, demanding that the prospective Democratic presidential nominee release all his service records from the period he spent in Vietnam’s river battle zone.

Preparing to unveil a sharply worded letter today to Kerry from more than 200 veterans, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth claims to represent a majority of Navy officers and enlisted men who served on the patrol boat detail that Kerry joined for nearly five months in 1968 and 1969.

By September, swift boat had been verbed. In her column in the New York Times on 5 September 2004, Maureen Dowd used the verb, but not directly in the context of Republican attacks on Kerry. Rather she deployed it while commenting on a remark Bush had made criticizing a New York Times column from 1948 that had been critical of Allied occupation policy in Germany:

The president distorted the columnist’s dispatch. The “moral crisis” and failure she described were in the British and French sectors. She reported that Americans were doing better because of their policy to “encourage initiative and develop self-government.” She wanted the U.S. to commit more troops and stay the course—not cut and run.

Mr. Bush swift-boated her.

The Manichaean Candidate’s convention was a brazen bizarro masterpiece. The case to sack John Kerry featured the same shady tactics.

The following year, swiftboating appeared again. This time as a response to critics of U.S. Representative John Murtha, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, who had been critical of the war in Iraq. From the Allentown, Pennsylvania Morning Call of 11 July 2005:

“I am appalled that the chicken hawk cowards who are swiftboating our heroic and decent men are allowed to get away with it,” wrote Charlie Karafotias of Titusville, Fla., who served in the Merchant Marine in World War II and later served in the Army.

“These … fanatics know that they can’t win any kind of rational debate, so they must destroy their opponent—‘swiftboat’ their critics,” wrote Monty Noland of Helena, Mont.

And swiftboating would again come to the fore in August 2024, with Republicans lying about Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz’s military service.

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Sources

All Hands, Bureau of Naval Personnel Career Publication, January 1966, 29. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Braun, Stephen. “Navy Veterans Fire on Kerry.” Los Angeles Times, 4 May 2004, A21/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Carpenter, Paul. “Murtha Column Strikes a Chord in Many Areas.” Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania), 11 July 2005, B1/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Dowd, Maureen. “Amnesia in the Garden.” New York Times, 5 September 2004, WK9/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Fierce Battle of Rice Bowl Leaves 88 Viet Cong Slain—McNamara Sees Bigger War.” Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee), 16 February 1966, 1/8. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Photo credit: Unknown photographer, U.S. Navy, late 1960s. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

rhodium

Three 1-gram samples of rhodium

9 August 2024

Rhodium is a hard, silvery-white metallic chemical element with atomic number 45 and the symbol Rh. Rhodium is quite rare, chiefly found as a component of platinum and nickel ores. It has a number of applications, including as a catalyst in chemical reactions, especially in automobile catalytic converters; in electrical contacts; in electroplating gold and silver jewelry; and in neutron detectors in nuclear reactors.

It was discovered in 1804 by William Hyde Wollaston in platinum ores. Wollaston coined the name rhodium from the Greek ῥόδον (rodon, meaning rose) + ‑ium because of the color of its chlorine salts, writing in the 1804 edition of Philosophical Transactions:

My inquiries having terminated more successfully than I had expected, I design in the present Memoir to prove the existence, and to examine the properties, of another metal, hitherto unknown, which may not improperly be distinguished by the name of Rhodium, from the rose-colour of a dilute solution of the salts containing it.

Rhodium was originally given the symbol Ro, which can be found in older texts.

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Sources:

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, s.v. rhodium, n.

Wollaston, William Hyde. “On a New Metal, Found in Crude Platina” (24 June 1804). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 94, 1804, 419–30 at 419. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1804.0019.

Photo credit: Heinrich Pniok, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivative 3.0 (US) license.

intersectionality

7 August 2024

Intersectionality is an analytical framework for examining how an individual’s various identities interact to create discrimination or privilege. Originally conceived to examine how race and gender interact, intersectionality can take into account any number of factors, including ethnicity, class, sexuality, country of origin, religion, disability, age, and weight. For example, the discrimination that a black woman experiences is not simply due to misogyny and racism operating independently, but the two factors interact to create a distinct form of discrimination. According to the theory, any analytical framework that examines discrimination along a single axis will be deficient.

The term was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, writing in the University of Chicago Legal Forum in 1989:

This focus on the most privileged group members marginalizes those who are multiply-burdened and obscures claims that cannot be understood as resulting from discrete sources of discrimination. I suggest further that this focus on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in experiences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon.

After examining the doctrinal manifestations of this single-axis framework, I will discuss how it contributes to the marginalization of Black women in feminist theory and in antiracist politics. I argue that Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender. These problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including Black women within an already established analytical structure. Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated. Thus, for feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse to embrace the experiences and concerns of Black women, the entire framework that has been used as a basis for translating “women's experience” or “the Black experience” into concrete policy demands must be rethought and recast.

The metaphor underlying the term is that of traffic at a road intersection. Crenshaw specifically evokes that metaphor in her article:

The point is that Black women can experience discrimination in any number of ways and that the contradiction arises from our assumptions that their claims of exclusion must be unidirectional. Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.

In a later, 1991 article, Crenshaw gives a specific example of how intersectionality operates:

I observed the dynamics of structural intersectionality during a brief field study of battered women's shelters located in minority communities in Los Angeles. In most cases, the physical assault that leads women to these shelters is merely the most immediate manifestation of the subordination they experience. Many women who seek protection are unemployed or underemployed, and a good number of them are poor. Shelters serving these women cannot afford to address only the violence inflicted by the batterer; they must also confront the other multilayered and routinized forms of domination that often converge in these women's lives, hindering their ability to create alternatives to the abusive relationships that brought them to shelters in the first place. Many women of color, for example, are burdened by poverty, child care responsibilities, and the lack of job skills. These burdens, largely the consequence of gender and class oppression, are then compounded by the racially discriminatory employment and housing practices women of color often face, as well as by the disproportionately high unemployment among people of color that makes battered women of color less able to depend on the support of friends and relatives for temporary shelter.

Intersectionality resists simplistic, one-axis explanations of discrimination and privilege, and it takes into account the specific situation and context. For instance, a battered, upper-middle-class Black woman might be better able to seek help compared to a poor, white woman. That does not mean that racism has ceased to operate, but rather that in this particular situation class is the dominant factor.

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Sources:

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–68 at 140, 149. HeinOnline.

———. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 43.6, July 1991, 1241–99 at 1245–46. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2015, s.v. intersectionality, n.

Image credits: Edward Kimmel, 2017. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license; Google Ngram Viewer, accessed 12 July 2024.

iron curtain / bamboo curtain

The Berlin Wall, 1986

5 August 2024

Winston Churchill is credited with coining a lot of pithy phrases, and many of these claims are false. The coining of the phrase iron curtain falls into a gray area. It is thought by many that Churchill coined the phrase in a 1946 speech in Fulton, Missouri, but the sense of the phrase meaning an impenetrable barrier had been in place long before. However, Churchill may have been the first to use it in the context of the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe following World War II.

The original sense of iron curtain was that of a fireproof screen in a theater that could be dropped between the stage and the audience in case the scenery caught fire. The first such iron curtain was installed in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London in 1794. Here is a description of the plan for the curtain in a 16 November 1793 newspaper:

NEW DRURY.—An extraordinary precaution is to be taken here against the communication of fire from one part of the Theatre to the other. An iron curtain, the roler [sic] of which will be sufficiently heavy to bring it down, is to be ready for use at the front of the stage, so that, if the scenery should, at any time, take fire, the stones will be prevented from reaching the audience part of the Theatre.

The innovation received considerable press upon its installation. But this first attempt at a theatrical iron curtain did not work well. By the time the Drury Lane Theatre was destroyed by fire in 1809, it had been removed. From the Manchester Mercury of 18 February 1809:

No performance having taken place last night, it being Oratorio night, there was but a watchman or two and porter in the house; and as the fire began at the most remote part from their usual stations, it had acquired an unconquerable height before they were aware of its having begun. The supply of water on the top of the Theatre was quite useless, the flames being up there as soon as any person could have reached the roof, and the iron curtain, which in case of fire it was intended to drop in the centre of the house, at the front of the stage, thus to have saved one half of it at least, had been found so rotten, the machinery so impracticable, that it had been removed.

But within a few decades iron curtain had generalized from a fire wall to that of any impenetrable barrier. The following appears in the 11 December 1817 journal entry of George Augustus Frederick FitzClarence, the eldest illegitimate son of King William IV, who was in the British army in India during a cholera epidemic:

On the 19th November we crossed the river Betwah, and as if an iron curtain had dropt between us and the avenging angel, the deaths diminished.

And we first see iron curtain used in relation to the Soviet Union beginning a hundred years later. Vasily Rozanov used it in November 1917 in one of the installments to The Apocalypse of Our Time, which ran from 1917 to 1918, but his use specifically evoked the metaphor of a theatrical safety curtain coming down at the end of the performance of an era of history:

C лязгом, скрипом, визгом опускается над Русскою Историею железный занавес.
—Представление окончилось.
Публика встала.
—Пора одевать шубы и возвращаться домой. Оглянулись.
Но ни шуб, ни домов не оказалось.

(With a clang, a creaking, a squeal, the iron curtain falls over Russian history. The performance is over. The audience stood up. “It’s time to put on our fur coats and go home.” They looked around. But there were no fur coats or houses.)

The book was translated into English in 1920. And in 1920 the metaphor shifted, and iron curtain began to be used to refer to the trade and travel barrier erected by the Western powers to prevent the spread of communism. Ethel Snowden, a British viscountess and feminist and socialist activist, wrote in her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia:

At Petrograd itself a large company met us although it was three o'clock in the morning, and we were told that gigantic crowds had loitered about the station all the day in expectation of our coming and in the hope of getting a glimpse at the English strangers. We were at once motored to the quarters which had been prepared for us, the palace of a Russian princess, and there, at four o'clock in the morning, we sat down to a simple but sufficient meal and received our welcome from the Trade Union officials who were to be our hosts during our stay.

We were behind the "iron curtain" at last!

And this piece, with a dateline of 24 April 1920, appears in the Times of London:

From what was known of the situation in Russia it might be inferred that when the iron curtain shutting off the country was lifted the abomination of desolation would be revealed behind it.

But at the end of World War II, Churchill would reverse the iron curtain, using the phrase to refer to a barrier erected by the Soviets to keep out Western influences. He would first use the phrase in a speech in the House of Commons on 16 August 1945:

The same conditions may reproduce themselves in a more modified form in the expulsion of great numbers of Sudeten and other Germans from Czechoslovakia: Sparse and guarded accounts of what has happened and is happening have filtered through, but it is not impossible that tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain.

Then on 5 March 1946, Churchill would deliver the famous “Sinews of Peace” or “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri:

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.

(Fulton, Missouri might seem to be an odd place for a major foreign policy address by a non-American, but President Harry Truman was from Missouri, so Truman bringing Churchill to the state was as much due to American domestic politics as it was due to foreign policy concerns.)

So Churchill can fairly be given credit for using an existing phrase in a somewhat novel metaphorical fashion. And undoubtedly the popularity of the phrase during the Cold War stems from Churchill’s use of it.

Iron curtain also spawned an Asian variant, the bamboo curtain. And the history of this phrase parallels that of its European cousin, in that it was first used to describe efforts to limit the spread of communism, before being reversed and referring to Chinese attempts to keep out Western influences. The phrase appears in the Times of India on 12 February 1947 in reference to French censorship of news coming out of Indochina:

In phrases like “behind the bamboo curtain” and “censorship commonsense in the country at war,” the Paris press today commented on Service censorship imposed by French authorities in Indo-China disclosed by Reuter’s special correspondent there.

And it was used to describe the barrier erected around the Japanese emperor in the 7 June 1948 issue of Newsweek:

BAMBOO CURTAIN: Can a god quit? The answer is yes—in Japan. A year ago, NEWSWEEK carried the news that Emperor Hirohito had considered abdicating because the new constitution was about to come into effect. Now, a year later, the emperor may resign over the verdict of the war-crimes trials. But even in abdication he may remain the power “behind the bamboo curtain.”

On 25 August 1948, the Associated Press used bamboo curtain to describe British censorship of news in Malaya:

Bamboo Curtain

Singapore (AP)—An authoritative source said today senior British officials are reconsidering a lower-level decision which has permitted a bamboo curtain of censorship to be dropped around police activities against Communist insurgents in Malaya. The informant said a more liberal press policy will be ordered soon.

Finally, by February 1949 the phrase was used to describe communist efforts to limit Kuomintang and Western influences in the regions of China they controlled. From an Associated Press report of 7 February 1949:

Postmen Pierce “Bamboo Curtain”

Nanking, China—(AP)—China’s postmen find it much easier than do peace negotiators to penetrate the “bamboo curtain” between Nationalist and Communist China. Mail service between the Communist area and Nanking moves smoothly. Postmen refuse to say how it is accomplished. They fear that disclosure of details might jeopardize the service.

And a few days later, on 11 February, the Associated Press had this:

Reports seeping through the “Bamboo Curtain” of Red China say the crackdown on foreigners has begun, even to the point of requiring church missions to give daily lessons in communism.

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Sources:

Associated Press. “News Briefs—From Everywhere. Arkansas Democrat (Little Rock), 25 August 1948, 10/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

———. “Postmen Pierce ‘Bamboo Curtain.’” Milwaukee Journal (Wisconsin), 7 February 1949, 4/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Censorship in Indo-China” (11 February 1947). Times of India (Mumbai), 12 February 1947, 5/1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Churchill, Winston. House of Commons debate, 16 August 1945. Hansard.

———. “The Sinews of Peace” (Iron Curtain speech), Fulton, Missouri, 5 March 1946. International Churchill Society.

“Drury Lane Theatre Destroyed by Fire.” Manchester Mercury and Harrop’s General Advertiser (Manchester, England), 18 February 1809, 1/6. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.

FitzClarence, George Augustus Frederick. Entry for 11 December 1817. Journal of a Route Across India, Through Egypt, to England. London: John Murray, 1819, 58. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“For Your Information.” Newsweek, 7 June 1948, 9/2. ProQuest: Magazine.

Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (London), 16 November 1793, 3/3. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

Milks, Harold K., Associated Press. “Reds Throttle China Missions” (11 February 1949). Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), 12 February 1949, . Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2013, s.v. iron curtain, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. bamboo curtain, n.

Rozanov, Vasily. Апокалипсис нашего времени (The Apocalypse of Our Time) (1919). Moscow: 1990, 46. Archive.org.

Snowden, Ethel (Mrs. Philip). Through Bolshevik Russia. London: Cassell, 1920, 31–32. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

“Sweden’s Condition to Russia. Indemnity Before Trading” (24 April 1920). Times (London), 26 April 1920, 14/5.

Photo credit: Thierry Noir, 1986. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.