The Japanese battleship Yamato was the lead ship of a class built for the Imperial Japanese Navy shortly before World War II. She and her sister ship Musashi were the heaviest and most heavily armed battleships ever built, displacing nearly 72,000 tonnes at full load and carrying nine 46 cm guns. Designed to counter the larger American battleship fleet, she was commissioned a week after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Yamato was the flagship when Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto directed the fleet at the Battle of Midway, a disastrous defeat for Japan. Her main guns fired at enemy surface ships only once, in October 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. By April 1945, Japan's fleet was depleted and short of fuel, and Yamato was sent on a one-way mission to Okinawa with orders to fight until destroyed. American carrier aircraft sank her on 7 April 1945, with the loss of most of her crew.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.