Why are the kid's religious beliefs worth mentioning in this article?
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/philip-wylie/gladiator
> Gladiator, first published in 1930, tells the story of Hugo Danner, who is given superhuman speed, endurance, strength, and intelligence by his father as an experiment in creating a better human. We follow Hugo throughout his life viewed from his perspective, from childhood, when Hugo first discovers he’s different from others, to adulthood, as Hugo tries to find a positive outlet for his abilities around the time of the first World War.
> Gladiator has been made into a 1938 comedy movie, and is thought to be the inspiration for the Superman comic books—though this has not been confirmed.
"XIX Catholic scientist invents pasteurization" - I truly fail to see the "coolness" of it.
This is an interesting part of the story because of the marginalization of Jewish immigrants during that interwar period.
'Jewish immigrants essentially invented the superhero genre' is a real stretch in this context. There were plenty of other cultural influences, particularly Japanese, in book and comic form that predate and were major influences on the US golden age of comic book explosion in popularity.
Jews, along with Blacks, were seen as outsiders to be marginalized by large sections of the dominant US culture at the time. Not as Whites to be assimilated. This is what makes Superman becoming such a large part of pop culture interesting.
And if you think the whole idea of the US at that time was about assimilation, not celebrating ethnicity, look up the "German American Bund" (I'd give you a link but have to restart Firefox).
I know this is the popular broad stroke concept of between wars American culture but in reality it was a lot more varied. The 'United States' was anything but united in that era. Huge numbers of blacks where migrating north to Chicago to work in manufacturing, different states had very different relationships with ethnicities and religions. NYC was always a very Jewish city for example.
Another example of rejecting assimilation and celebrating other cultures were the German American Bund as you note, with large rallies etc celebrating the German National Socialist movement by German immigrants.
https://www.chicagocovenants.com/
(I volunteered for this project, will do so again soon, and recommend it; it's super fascinating, and if you go shoot me an email).
Redlining, the practice of refusing to underwrite mortgages in predominantly Black neighborhoods, continued up through around 1970.
The entire city of Chicago is defined by these apartheid-styled racial boundaries. I live in Oak Park, across Austin Blvd. from an almost totally Black neighborhood; Oak Park exists precisely because it was not redlined, and so wealthy white families could feel comfortable buying homes there. I grew up in Beverly, where a similar border exists at around 90th and Ashland:
https://interactive.wttw.com/firsthand/segregation/mapping-c...
You can look at where all the crime is in Chicago and see a map of C and D-graded tracts today. When Uber first launched here, their service map resembled these maps as well!
The article mention how the Jewish cultural background influenced Superman, eg superman arriving like Moses.
But does the article even talk about the religous beliefs of the kids?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Shuster
Both work for me, and in the context of how two young men impacted U.S. settler culture, with its profoundly Anglo-Saxon basis, it is entirely valid to identify their cultural, religious, and/or political background.
An animated data-driven documentary about war and peace, The Fallen of World War II looks at the human cost of the second World War and sizes up the numbers to other wars in history, including trends in recent conflicts.