Featured Articles
The Pioneer Infantry in the Great War
The World War I Illinois State Normal University Service Records collection is filled with stories of heroism from ISNU students and staff, collected by our first librarian, Ange Milner. Milner also collected files from Black [...]
The ‘Hello Girls’ helped win WWI—why was their service overlooked?
When American women were first deployed into combat zones, the U.S. refused to consider them veterans for more than 50 years. Ethel Elkins was one roughly 25,000 American women who volunteered in Europe during the [...]
Doughboy MIA For June 2024: Colonel Raynal Cawthorne Bolling
Over one hundred years have passed since one the most influential American figures in the history of American air power, went missing in action between two small communes in France’s Somme region. On 26 March [...]
Donuts sparked Salvation Army’s service to military for 110 years, national leader says
Evangelical church seeks to 'do the most good' for those in need The Salvation Army’s 110-year-old gambit of giving American soldiers in World War I a “taste of home” helped fuel this nation’s obsession with [...]
The factors that led the U.S. to join the Allies in 1917
For all its length and ferocity, World War I would probably have ended quite differently had it not been for America’s entry into the war on behalf of the Allies in 1917. Up until then, [...]
Is Captain Eddie Rickenbacker Overrated?
I have mentioned the famous American fighter pilot Captain Eddie Rickenbacker in my writings from time to time over the years, and I always wanted to write an article specifically about him because it is quite common [...]
The WWI veteran who stormed Normandy with nothing but a cane and pistol
“We’ll start the war from right here!” Brig. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. purportedly declared as his Higgins landing craft drifted about a mile from its target destination on Utah Beach the morning of June 6, [...]
An American Urologist on the Western Front in World War I
Remembering Dr. GG Smith It began like any other clinical encounter between a urologist and their new patient: I asked Mr. Rush what prompted him to schedule the visit and what kind of work he [...]
Albert Grass: WWI Lakota Code Talker gets bridge named in his Honor
My name is Timothy Hunts-in-Winter, an enrolled citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe who resides in Arizona. I’m just a guy who began researching my family's WWI soldiers and my tribemates’ soldiers almost 3 [...]
