The Story of Menstruation is a 1946 10-minute animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions in 1946.
It was commissioned by the International Cello-Cotton Company (now Kimberly-Clark) and was shown to approximately 105 million American students in health education classes.
It was one of the first commercially sponsored films to be distributed to high schools. It was distributed with a booklet for teachers and students called Very Personally Yours that featured advertising of the Kotex brand of products, and discouraged the use of tampons, where the market was dominated by the Tampax brand of rivals Procter & Gamble.
The Story of Menstruation is believed to be the first film to use the word vagina in its screenplay. Neither sexuality nor reproduction is mentioned in the film, and an emphasis on sanitation makes it, as Disney historian Jim Korkis has suggested: “a hygienic crisis rather than a maturation event.”
Island of Hope – Island of Tears; Charles Guggenheim; National Park Service; AVA15996VNB1 1992 (1989);
From 1892-1954, Ellis Island was the port of entry for millions of European immigrants. Fascinating archival footage tells the moving story of families with dreams of opportunity, leaving their homes with what they could carry.
CINE – Golden Eagle Award 1990; Columbus International Film and Video Festival – Chris Award 1990; Earthwatch; Institute Film Award – 1991; National; Educational Film & Video Festival – Bronze Apple 1991.
Director: Charles Guggenheim; Producer: National Park Service; Creative Commons license: Public Domain; Credits; Uploaded by Public.Resource.Org under a joint venture with NTIS.
Rebroadcast of “Island of Hope – Island of Tears” is made possible on the Internet by a grant from Joseph McFadden of Philadelphia. Between 1892 and the early 1950s, nearly 15 million people streamed through Ellis Island in search of a new life. Here are the stories of those extraordinary immigrants, largely in their own poignant words. Coming primarily from Southern and Eastern Europe, and from widely diverse backgrounds, the émigrés represented in this remarkable volume recount their adventures with dignity, wit, and unflagging honesty.
From 1892 to 1954, over twelve million immigrants entered the United States through the portal of Ellis Island, a small island in New York Harbor. Ellis Island is located in the upper bay just off the New Jersey coast, within the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Through the years, this gateway to the new world was enlarged from its original 3.3 acres to 27.5 acres by landfill supposedly obtained from the ballast of ships, excess earth from the construction of the New York City subway system and elsewhere.
Before being designated as the site of one of the first Federal immigration station by President Benjamin Harrison in 1890, Ellis Island had a varied history. The local Indian tribes had called it “Kioshk” or Gull Island. Due to its rich and abundant oyster beds and plentiful and profitable shad runs, it was known as Oyster Island for many generations during the Dutch and English colonial periods. By the time Samuel Ellis became the island’s private owner in the 1770′s, the island had been called Kioshk, Oyster, Dyre, Bucking and Anderson’s Island. In this way, Ellis Island developed from a sandy island that barely rose above the high tide mark, into a hanging site for pirates, a harbor fort, ammunition and ordinance depot named Fort Gibson, and finally into an immigration station.
Despite the island’s reputation as an “Island of Tears”, the vast majority of immigrants were treated courteously and respectfully, and were free to begin their new lives in America after only a few short hours on Ellis Island. Only two percent of the arriving immigrants were excluded from entry. The two main reasons why an immigrant would be excluded were if a doctor diagnosed that the immigrant had a contagious disease that would endanger the public health or if a legal inspector thought the immigrant was likely to become a public charge or an illegal contract laborer.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson declared Ellis Island part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Ellis Island was opened to the public on a limited basis between 1976 and 1984. Starting in 1984, Ellis Island underwent a major restoration, the largest historic restoration in U.S. history. The $160 million dollar project was funded by donations made to the Statue of Liberty – Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. in partnership with the National Park Service. The Main Building was reopened to the public on September 10, 1990 as the Ellis Island Immigration Museum. Today, the museum receives almost 2 million visitors annually.
An experiment in Guatemala in the 1940s that included U.S. doctors now has victims there seeking legal recourse. People were infected with syphilis to test the effectiveness of penicillin. (May 27, 2011)
This film warns that Americans will lose their country if they let themselves be turned into “suckers” by the forces of fanaticism and hatred. This thesis is rendered more powerful by the ever-present example of Nazi Germany, whose capsule history is dramatized as part of this film. There’s a great deal of good sense in this film and more than a bit of wartime populism: “Let’s not think about ‘we’ and ‘they.’ Let’s think about ‘us’!”
It’s interesting to think of this film in the light of Cold War anti-Communist politics, which really came into their own in the year this film was made. Were the witch-hunting politicians and citizens of the late Forties and early Fifties protecting the people, or were they themselves acting like “suckers?”
Producer: U.S. War Department
Sponsor: U.S. War Department
On the Japanese soldier: “He and his brother soldiers are as much alike as photographic prints off the same negative.”
Clip from an Anti-Japanese Propaganda video entitled “Know Your Enemy: Japan.” Released in 1945, the film gives an overview of Japanese social, military, and political culture, attempting to provide a rationale for America’s war with Japan. You can watch the hour long documentary in its entirety on our website:
Maintaining Classroom Discipline (1947). Good and bad methods of disciplining inappropriate classsroom behavior. This was a very well made instructional movie for teachers. While there are new & different problems in the modern schools, the basic ideas of this film still holds. The opening messages are exactly what the best research on classroom behaviour tells us:
1. The vast majority of behaviour problems in the classrom involve minor breaches of discipline.
2. These incidents originate in the classroom situation itself and are within the control of the teacher.
3. Disciplinary problems in the classroom are symptoms of underlying weaknesses in total learning situation. BY CONTRASTING METHODS OF HANDLING THE SAME CLASS, TECHNIQUES ARE SHOWN FOR SECURING CLASS DISCIPLINE and STIMULATING THE INTEREST OF STUDENTS.Producer: McGraw-Hill Films; Creative Commons license: Public Domain.
I made this film for the 50th anniversary of Life Magazine. I had the chance to interview the great Life photojournalists and tell their stories. This sequence shows how Life publicized the civil rights movement and school segregation making Americans aware of it.
1:23 “Women scare me–at least they do in a factory.”
1:53 “You see, they’re not naturally familiar with mechanical principles nor machines.”
2:41 “You know, women workers can be surprisingly good producers.”
2:50 “When breaking in any new worker, and of course especially a woman, you’ve got to explain every angle of the process, down to the last detail.”
4:29 “I guess women don’t realize what it means to stick on the job.”
5:37 Wife: “So many of them have two jobs, Joe–one in the home, one in the plant.” Husband: “Gee, I’m glad I thought of that!” Wife: “Yes, dear.” (The Second Shift, Arlie Hochschild)
After Allan Woodrow, AKA “Woody,” receives a ticket to the carnival for “one couple,” he realizes that he’ll need to find a date: “One couple. That means a date! Not like just going around with a crowd. Just me and a girl.” But Woody’s never asked a girl out. The film takes us through the phases of dating, from picking the right gal, to best practices for calling her, to proper goodnight etiquette. After running through a number of fraught scenarios, Woody learns the best way to get the girl — and keep her.
Produced by the National Association of Manufacturers in 1940, this film offers a rebuke to communism.
Teenage Jerry has been wooed by the anti-capitalists down at the plant, so Grampa Robinson gives Jerry a long talk about the history of the town, which has been built – just like America – on capitalism.
