Featured Articles
A Chicago Doughboy’s Postcard from France
Paul Kurowski Nothing makes history more interesting than a personal connection to the distant times one usually only reads about in books. And so, when I learned from a cousin in 2018 that [...]
Mercy Dogs: Meet the Heroes Who Delivered Aid and Comforted the Dying On the Battlefields of World War I
Over 16 million total animals were in service during the Great War. In the agony of trench warfare and no man’s land, the sound of a skitter and a wet nose — typically a rat, doubled [...]
Grace Banker and Her Hello Girls Answer the Call: The Heroic Story of WWI Telephone Operators
Several years ago I spent quite a bit of time studying the early 1900s through WWI. I read nonfiction and fiction about and from that era. So I was fascinated when I discovered Switchboard Soldiers: A [...]
The Christmas Party at Camp Upton 1918
Telephone Operators Quartered in U. S. Army Barracks Transform Their Home at Upton Into a Santa Claus Paradise CAMP UPTON!" called the conductor. The train came to a standstill, wheezing and coughing as its burden [...]
In World War I, France started to build a fake Paris to confuse German bombers
Just after noon on August 30, 1914, about a month into World War I, a biplane marked with the German iron cross under its wings flew 6,000 feet above France’s capital city. Soon, to the [...]
The Great War Atrocity That Changed War Crimes Prosecutions Forever
I first encountered the story of His Majesty’s Hospital Ship (HMHS) Llandovery Castle while doing online research about the First World War. I came across a reference to the Leipzig War Crimes Trials—the forgotten attempt [...]
Eugene Bullard, pioneering African-American aviator who flew for France in World War I
The first African-American combat pilot flew not for his country, but for France. Born in the segregated south of the United States at the turn of the 20th century, Eugene Bullard moved to Paris and [...]
The Forgotten African-American Regiments of World War I
Over 380,000 African-American troops served in World War One according to the US National Archives. Here, Chris Fray looks at the role the Black Americans played in the war in the context of the time. [...]
Tanks, Scout Planes, and Combined Arms: How the Allies Finally Broke the WWI Trench Stalemate
Plus, what the lessons learned in WWI mean for the current trench stalemate in Ukraine. Mud, blood, and barbed wire. To an Allied soldier in the trenches of the Western Front in 1917, that seemed [...]