Alistair Cooke's 'letters' to The Times

During the early years of the War, while Alistair Cooke was struggling to persuade the BBC to take up his suggestion of a weekly “American Letter”, he contributed a series of articles, as a "Special correspondent" or "Our New York correspondent", to The Times.

Today is the centenary of his birth and, as Comment Central reports, the University of Norwich is making 3,000 of his Letter from America scripts available to the public.

You can read some of his Times articles here:

Three days after the first bombing of London Americans contributed over $100,000 to the Allied Relief Fund in answer to a new appeal from its president, Mr. Winthrop Aldrich, for aid to the homeless poor of London

The torrent of American sympathy, October 15, 1940

It is only three months since conscription was mooted, argued, and thought of as a distant exigency. Six months ago it was a European monopoly. To-day it is willingly embraced by a democratic population which has witnessed in horror the downfall of free societies slow to recognize the forces that moved against them

First American conscripts, October 16, 1940

Ever since the name of Quisling came to signify the betrayal of a nation from within, American journalism has been busy picturing the scope and potential of an American Fifth Column

Foreign agents in America, February 27, 1941

From magazine covers and highway billboards the same pretty girls laud the nation's products,  but this year they do it in uniform

America in Wartime, March 21, 1941

Not very far away is encamped a platoon of Marines, consisting entirely of full-blooded Navahos. It is here that one is proudly told of the remarkable fighting contribution of the American Indian. In the two months after Pearl Harbour a higher percentage of Indians volunteered in the armed forces than any other racial minority in the United States

The American South-West, December 11, 1943