An American emerges from his family’s fallout shelter in Medford, Massachusetts wearing protective clothing and carrying a geiger counter, October 1961. 

AP Photo

Inside Paris’s Grand Guignol, a theatre that was once popular for its live horror/shock shows; images from Life. 

Plays with plots like these were the norm:

• When a doctor finds his wife’s lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor’s brain.
• Two hags in an insane asylum use scissors to blind a young, pretty fellow inmate out of jealousy.
• A nanny strangles the children in her care.
• A young woman visits the man whose face she horribly disfigured with acid, where he obtains his revenge.

These were performed live, with the help of practical special effects (limited by whatever was available during the time period, but still). Non-horror plays were also performed, but these were not as popular. One of the Grand Guignol’s most famous performers, Paula Maxa, was called “the most assassinated woman in the world”, having been murdered and raped in plays thousands of times during her productive career. 

The theatre began to decline in popularity during and after World War II before finally closing in 1962 after sixty-five years of operation; said its final director: “We could never equal Buchenwald.” 

Happy birthday, Bob Ross. 

October 29, 1897: Joseph Goebbels is born.

Hitler’s chief propagandist (“Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda”) was a bitter, diminutive figure described by Albert Speer as an “intellectual” who “looked down on the crude philistines” that made up much of the party, and by others as a “goblin”, as a “poison dwarf”, and “the little doctor”. Goebbels was, physically, the opposite of the Aryan ideal - he was short, frail, dark-haired, and he had, as a child, developed a deformity on his leg that caused him to walk with a limp. Despite his far-from-perfect appearance, Goebbels was also apparently a “serial seducer”. 

Goebbels joined the NSDAP in 1924, while Adolf Hitler was still serving a prison sentence for leading the Beer Hall Putsch. In the end, he was also probably Hitler’s most loyal supporter; Goebbels wrote of his love for his Führer, whom he described as a “political genius”, and he replaced Hitler as Chancellor after the latter’s death. He held this position for only a day, before his entire family committed suicide. 

In life, Goebbels and his ministry were in charge of maintaining the cultural identity of the Third Reich and implementing the policy known as Gleischaltung. This involved, among other things, purging the German art and music scenes of what was considered degenerate (typically modern art, jazz, and anything “Jewish” in nature). Goebbels and Hitler were also interested in using film as a means of propaganda; documentaries were filmed, of course, but cinema was media for the masses, and films like Jud Süß (a box-office hit created at the behest of Goebbels) were both popular with the public and effective anti-semitic propaganda. 

October 28, 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis ends.

The Cuban Missile Crisis marked the highest point of tension between the United States and USSR during the Cold War. After President Kennedy ordered a “quarantine” of Cuba on October 22, declaring in an address that the United States would regard any missile attacks from Cuba “as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”

Four days later, the crisis reached a stalemate; the Soviet Union had not displayed any signs of backing down, and the United States could not possibly allow the missiles to remain where they were, less than 100 miles from Florida. The Strategic Air Command was ordered to DEFCON 2, the highest state of military readiness before imminent nuclear war (the first and only time during the entire Cold War). The crisis was finally ended by secret negotiations conducted between President Kennedy’s Cabinet and Soviet officials. Khrushchev would remove his missiles from Cuba, and the United States pledged never to invade Cuba and also to remove its Jupiter missiles from Turkey, a promise that was fulfilled by April of 1963. 

Because of the secretive nature of these negotiations, the USSR came out of the crisis as the weaker party, even though both countries had been forced to compromise. To the public, however, it seemed as though the USSR had completely succumbed to American pressure, and Khrushchev’s removal from office two years later may have been in part caused by the embarrassing aftermath of the event. After this close brush with nuclear war, the Soviet Union and United States established the Moscow-Washington hotline (the “red telephone”), which provided a clearer and more direct means of communication between the two nations. 

October 27, 1858: Theodore Roosevelt is born.

Theodore Roosevelt took office as president of the United States upon the assassination of William McKinley in 1901; interestingly enough, although he is often regarded as one of the country’s greatest presidents, he was forced onto the Republican ticket by political bosses against the will of McKinley’s campaign manager. 

Roosevelt was president, but he was also an avid reader, an athlete, a respected historian, a sheriff, New York City Police Commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, commander of the “Rough Riders” cavalry regiment, and governor of New York.  He was often hesitant and passive on the subject of racial equality, but he was also the first president to invite an African-American to the White House for dinner. He was a big game hunter and also an outspoken conservationist who placed over 200 million acres of land under public protection. He was repelled by corruption, and he was the first major trust-busting president, as well as the first president to use federal power to intervene and arbitrate a strike rather than to crush it. He issued a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that was used to advance American imperialism, and he encouraged the strengthening of the country’s then relatively weak military, but he also won the Nobel Peace Prize for his successful mediation between Russia and Japan at a 1905 peace conference. He was born into a wealthy, privileged family, but his political philosophy of “New Nationalism” was a mostly pro-labor program designed to protect workers from exploitation (among other points). 

Roosevelt promoted the idea of a strong American identity (he once called the country ”the mightiest nation upon which the sun shines”), and in some ways his presidency can be seen as the starting point of the modern United States.