Welsh-born cartoonist Leslie Gilbert Illingworth drew the famous cartoon of John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev arm wrestling while sitting on hydrogen bombs. It appeared in the October 29, 1962 edition of the British newspaper The Daily Mail.

Born in 1902, Illingworth started drawing cartoons for the famous British news magazine Punch in 1927. The Daily Mail hired him as well in 1937 and he continued to provide cartoons for both publications for the rest of his career. He gained a measure of national fame for the effective cartoons he drew during England's dogged stand against Nazi Germany.

Illingworth was not an overtly political cartoonist and this is evident in this arm wrestling cartoon. One notices the characteristic Illingworth preference for detail rather than commentary on who is right or wrong. The intensity of the struggle is captured both by the energy that radiates out of Kennedy and Khrushchev's gripped hands, but also by the fact that each is sweating profusely. Each man still has his finger on the button that will detonate the bombs.

Illingworth's drawings contrast sharply with those of Edmund Valtman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and fiercely anti-communist cartoonist for The Hartford Times. On October 30, after the crisis had seemingly passed, his paper published a Valtman cartoon of Khrushchev yanking missile-shaped teeth out of a hideous-looking Castro's mouth. The caption above the illustration reads, “This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You” and the cartoon clearly represents a moment of American gloating over the communists.

That the Illingworth cartoon was published in a British newspaper bears witness to the fact that the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis affected the fate of populations beyond those of the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed the whole world was watching. The publication date of October 29 is also significant since on October 28, Khrushchev announced that he was withdrawing the missiles out of Cuba and the crisis seemingly had passed. Illingworth's cartoon reminded readers that the superpower struggle would continue and that the possibility of nuclear annihilation remained.

Fundamentalism, in the narrowest meaning of the term, was a movement that began in the late 19th- and early 20th-century within American Protestant circles to defend the "fundamentals of belief" against the corrosive effects of liberalism that had grown within the ranks of Protestantism itself. Liberalism, manifested in critical approaches to the Bible that relied on purely natural assumptions, or that framed Christianity as a purely natural or human phenomenon that could be explained scientifically, presented a challenge to traditional belief.

A multi-volume group of essays edited by Reuben Torrey, and published in 1910 under the title, The Fundamentals, was financed and distributed by Presbyterian laymen Lyman and Milton Stewart and was an attempt to arrest the drift of Protestant belief. Its influence was large and was the source of the labeling of conservatives as "fundamentalists."

Useful for looking at this history of fundamentalism are George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford, 1980), Bruce B. Lawrence, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt against the Modern Age (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism Since 1850 (Greenville: Unusual Publications, 1986), and Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992).

Lately, the meaning of the word "fundamentalism" has expanded. This has happened in the press, in academia, and in ordinary language. It appears to be expanding to include any unquestioned adherence to fundamental principles or beliefs, and is often used in a pejorative sense. Nowadays we hear about not only Protestant evangelical fundamentalists, but Catholic fundamentalists, Mormon fundamentalists, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu fundamentalists, Buddhist fundamentalists, and even atheist or secular or Darwinian fundamentalists.

Scholars of religion have perhaps indirectly contributed to this expansion of the term, as they have tried to look for similarities in ways of being religious that are common in various systems of belief. Between 1991 and 1995, religion scholars Martin Marty and Scott Appleby published a 5-volume collection of essays as part of "The Fundamentalism Project" at the University of Chicago, which is an example of this approach. Appleby is co-author of Strong Religion (2003), also from the University of Chicago Press that attempts to give a common explanatory framework for understanding anti-modern and anti-secular religious movements around the world.

Sears Roebuck, like its competitor Montgomery Ward, built its business as a mail-order company. Consequently, many of its customers were farmers or at least lived far away from big cities. The majority of Sears Roebuck customers also ordered out of the Montgomery Ward catalog.

In the early 1920s, many of Sears Roebuck's rural mail-order customers wrote to the company asking them to set up a way for trappers to sell their furs. Beginning in late 1925, Sears Roebuck & Company, through the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services, began buying furs from independent, rural trappers. Trappers would mail packages of their prepared muskrat, mink, otter, raccoon, fox, badger, beaver, weasel, skunk, and opossum pelts to a Sears depot. At first there was only one in Chicago, but the company soon increased the number of depots around the country, including ones in Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Memphis, Kansas City, Des Moines, Denver, and Minneapolis.

Sears would grade the pelts and either promptly send the trappers a check or give them credit toward purchases from its general merchandise catalog. If the trapper was unsatisfied with the value Sears gave him, he could return the check and the company would return the furs. The vast Sears catalog carried a line of Victor, Oneida, and Gibbs traps, scents, and pelt stretchers, as well as firearms, ammunition, decoys, and a wide selection of farm equipment and supplies.

In this way, Sears Roebuck became one of the largest fur buying companies in the country. The trappers generally found the company's fur grading to be accurate and the prices paid to be fair, especially for good, large skins. The company had found a way to help their rural customers by giving them a market for their furs that was as close as their mailboxes. Farmers trapped for sport and recreation, but also to control the wildlife population that threatened their crops.

Sears Roebuck mailed more than 7 million copies of an annual publication, Tips to Trappers, a magazine of about 30 pages in length, written and edited by "Johnny Muskrat" (a trapper, as well as a Sears spokesman) "and his trapper friends."

Tips to Trappers had articles and photographs showing the best ways to find and trap animals and prepare their pelts, as well as letters from readers, techniques from renowned trappers, information on state trapping seasons and limits, news on the fur market, and instructions on how to prepare and mail pelts to Sears. Included in each issue were shipping tags for mailing packages to a Sears raw fur depot.

Sears Roebuck also ran the National Fur Show in different cities around the country each year from 1929 to 1958. Pelts that had been submitted to Sears depots during the year were judged at the shows and cash awards (and even new cars) were given for the "best prepared" pelts, regardless of their ultimate value. This helped promote and teach the company's suppliers and clients about the best ways to handle pelts.

Johnny Muskrat also had a regular radio show during the 1920s and 1930s on Sears' own Chicago-based radio station WLS ("World's Largest Store"), and then elsewhere in the country through station affiliates. He and his occasional trapper guest would talk about how to set traps, dry pelts, and other techniques. Muskrat also discussed fur market conditions, tips on camping and hunting, and pioneer life in general, as well as reading letters from his listeners.

Radio station WLS was the voice of the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation, which Sears began in 1924 as a means to increase its outreach to American farmers. The programming on WLS was a mix of music and entertainment (such as its annual sponsorship and broadcast of the "National Barn Dance") designed to appeal to a rural audience, as well as regular shows for farm listeners that were devoted to growing, harvesting, and selling crops.

The Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation offered advice and instruction by mail to farmers and their wives who wrote to the company. The Foundation also supported rural agricultural agents, farmers' markets, cooperative associations, 4-H and FFV chapters, agricultural demonstration projects, and scholarships to agricultural colleges.

Sears Roebuck and Company's second president, during the 1920s and 1930s, Julius Rosenwald, was a true philanthropist who viewed the Sears Roebuck Agricultural Foundation not just as a way to capture customers for Sears, but as a means to improve the lives of Americans living in rural communities. He was, for example, responsible for Sears' extensive support for Historically Black Colleges, especially in the South, and for the establishment of almost 5,000 schools for African American children in the region.

After 34 years in the fur buying business, Sears Roebuck decided in 1958 to focus on urban customers and retail stores, and so discontinued, among other things, the Sears Raw Fur Marketing Services and the publication of Tips to Trappers.