Margaret Naumburg

Margaret Naumburg was the first person to introduce Art Therapy to the world. She mixed between psychiatry and art. "She took her patient off the couch and in front of an isle". She believed that art can reflect the patient inner conflict. Her book: "Studies of the "free" Expression of Behavior Problem children as Means of Diagnosis and Therapy" Was published in 1947.

American Scene Painting in 1940's

American Scene Painting refers to naturalist style of painting that showed in the american art work between the 1920's and the 1950's. American scene painting is also know as Regionalism. Some of the famous artist in the 1940's are Thomas Hart Benton and John Rogers Cox.

Farnsworth House

One of the pioneers  of Modern architectures is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who is a German-American Architect. Farnsworth House is the one of his famous work. The house was build in 1946 through 1951 . it was built as a weekend retreat outside of chicago for an independent professional woman "Dr. Erin Farnsworth". Here, Mies explored the relationship between people, shelter, and nature. The glass pavilion is raised six feet above a floodplain next to the Fox River, surrounded by forest and rural prairies.

The highly-crafted pristine white structural frame and all-glass walls define a simple rectilinear interior space, allowing nature and light to envelop the interior space. A wood-panelled fireplace (also housing mechanical equipment, kitchen, and toilets) is positioned within the open space to suggest living, dining and sleeping spaces without using walls. No partitions touch the surrounding all-glass enclosure. Without solid exterior walls, full-height draperies on a perimeter track allow freedom to provide full or partial privacy when and where desired. The house has been described as sublime, a temple hovering between heaven and earth, a poem, a work of art.

The Farnsworth House and its 60-acre (240,000 m2) wooded site was purchased at auction for US$7.5 million by preservation groups in 2004 and is now owned and operated by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a public museum. The building influenced the creation of hundreds of modernist glass houses, most notably the Glass House by Philip Johnson, located near New York City and also now owned by the National Trust.

The Atomic bombs

The infamous event of the 1940's (May, 8 1945) in my opinion is the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The brutality of the results cant be justified by war. The atomic bombs claimed so many life and left the rest effected for so many years.

ENIAC

Partnership of John Mauchly & John Presper Eckert

On May 31, 1943, the military commission on the new computer began; John Mauchly was the chief consultant and John Presper Eckert was the chief engineer. Eckert was a graduate student studying at the Moore School when he met John Mauchly in 1943. It took the team about one year to design the ENIAC and 18 months and 500,000 tax dollars to build it. By that time, the war was over. The ENIAC was still put to work by the military doing calculations for the design of a hydrogen bomb, weather prediction, cosmic-ray studies, thermal ignition, random-number studies and wind-tunnel design.

What Was Inside The ENIAC?

The ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, along with 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, 6,000 manual switches and 5 million soldered joints. It covered 1800 square feet (167 square meters) of floor space, weighed 30 tons, consumed 160 kilowatts of electrical power. There was even a rumor that when turned on the ENIAC caused the city of Philadelphia to experience brownouts, however, this was first reported incorrectly by the Philadelphia Bulletin in 1946 and since then has become an urban myth.

In one second, the ENIAC (one thousand times faster than any other calculating machine to date) could perform 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications or 38 divisions. The use of vacuum tubes instead of switches and relays created the increase in speed, but it was not a quick machine to re-program. Programming changes would take the technicians weeks, and the machine always required long hours of maintenance. As a side note, research on the ENIAC led to many improvements in the vacuum tube.

Academy Awards in 1940

 In 1940's Academy Award, the film "Gone with the wind" was the film that got most of the oscars.

• Best Actress in a Leading Role
• Vivien Leigh
• Best Actress in a Supporting Role
• Hattie McDaniel
• Became the first African American to be nominated for and win an Oscar.
• Best Art Direction
• Lyle R. Wheeler
• Best Cinematography, Color
• Ernest Haller
• Ray Rennahan
• Best Director
• Victor Fleming
• Best Film Editing
• Hal C. Kern
• James E. Newcom
• Best Picture
• (Selznick International Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)).
• Best Writing, Screenplay
• Sidney Howard
• Technical Achievement Award
• R.D. Musgrave
• (Selznick International Pictures Inc.).
• For pioneering in the use of coordinated equipment in the production Gone with the Wind.
• Honorary Award
• William Cameron Menzies
• For outstanding achievement in the use of color for the enhancement of dramatic mood in the production of Gone with the Wind (plaque).

Music in the 1940's

Jazz was the most popular form of music during the war, but there were audiences for country music, western swing, blues and R&B, rhythm and blues.

It was hard to keep bands together. By October, 1942, the jazz magazine Down Beat was running a regular feature called "Killed in Action" listing musicians who had been lost. At one point, there were over 60 bandleaders who enlisted. Others, like Benny Goodman, who couldn't qualify because of health or age volunteered to go to the troops through the USO or who made special "V-Discs" that were distributed to troops.