I’m about to go judge a public speaking contest, but I wanted to note these links:

• World War II London Blitz Diary 1939-1945: someone is posting Great-Grandmother Ruby Thompson’s diary from during the Blitz in London. Very cool reading, interesting and, you know, detailed in ways that are worthy of note to people researching the time. (I found the link helping a student find resources for WWII London life, for a story she’s writing.)
• This post on the Women’s History Network Blog has a neat discussion of “Career Novels in the 1950s” — a kind of juvenile-oriented novel for girls grappling with the idea of work in that period between graduating from high school, and marrying/reproducing, which was, at the time, a rather new concept for how a woman’s life could go. There’s also some discussion of the romanticization of the then-new position (for women) of “air hostess,” which then (as now in Korea) had attached to it a strange kind of glamour which seems to have worn off in much of the West. I very often find myself comparing things, in terms of gender roles and shifts within them, to 1950s America, though I would also say it’s an erroneous comparison. (There’s plenty in the American 1920s that deserves comparison to Korean gender issues today.) Still, I’ve been watching the first season of Mad Men with Miss Jiwaku and more often than not, she marvels at how so much of the behaviors and attitudes she hates and sees around her in Korea today is right there on the screen, except with white Americans being the bigots and sexists and assheaded society. It’s interesting.