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Nicole White “What is the most decadent thing anybody could ever do? Get all dressed up, do their make up, and stay at home.” -Marc Jacobs Jazz music, speakeasies, flappers, and the mob were all part of Kansas City in the 1920s, but the Paris of the Plains was also swarming with creativity and innovation. In the early twenties, Walt Disney started an animation company called Laugh-O-gram Films on E. 31st Street in Kansas City where he created black and white animated short films based on classic fairytales. He befriended a small mouse in the building, which was said to have inspired his creation of Mickey Mouse. Later that decade, Ernest Hemingway, who had previously worked for the Kansas City Star , drove his wife back to the city for the birth of their second child while, at the same time, he was putting the finishing touches on one of his greatest masterpieces, A Farewell to Arms. And just around the corner, dressmaker Nell Donnelly Reed was making her mark in history. Nell, born in...

Randall Stephens The latest issue of the Journal of the Historical Society should be in mailboxes and on the shelves of libraries now.  The June 2013 issue features a forum on Jennifer Luff's 2012 UNC Press book Commonsense Anticommunism: Labor and Civil Liberties between the World Wars . The introduction to the forum notes that:    Luff finds that during the 1920s and into the '30s, the American Federation of Labor developed a policy position between labor radicalism and state intervention: the AFL's “commonsense anticommunism” promoted voluntarist efforts to curb Communist influence within its unions while also opposing legislation that would outlaw Communist agitation. This position would shift over time, but Luff reveals much about “labor conservatives” that should surprise readers accustomed to the usual popular narrative about the varied strands of the labor movement, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and American anticommunism. After Luff introduces her work to our reader...