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World War I

There was no evidence that Captain Rosenbluth was a murderer, but Henry Ford set out to prove him one.

On an October afternoon in 1918, Major Alexander Pennington "Buddy" Cronkhite took practice with a .45 at a tobacco can atop a post at Camp Lewis, Washington.

The great struggles of our century have all been followed by tides of revulsion: Americans decided we were mad to have entered World War I; Russia should have been our enemy in World War II; the United States started the Cold War. Now, another such tide has risen in Europe, and it may be on its way here.

History is revisionism. It is the frequent—nay, the ceaseless—reviewing and revising and rethinking of the past.

A scholar searches across two centuries to discover the main engine of our government’s growth, and reaches a controversial conclusion.

Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that America had no neighbors and hence no enemies.

After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization, but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.

Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off.
It is one of the more curious distortions of the recent past that, 30 years ago, World War I seemed farther away from us than it does today.

THREE-QUARTERS OF A CENTURY HAS NOT BEEN TIME ENOUGH TO EFFACE THE REMNANTS OF VIOLENCE ALONG A 400-MILE FRONT.

It is early fall in France, anf the forest is silent and peaceful. A man, dressed in camouflage fatigues and carrying a metal detector and a sawed-off pickax, disappears into the misty underbrush.

A TEXAS MARINE WHO DREW BEAUTIFULLY AND WROTE AS WELL AS HE DREW BECAME THE LAUREATE OF THE MEN WHO CHECKED THE LAST GREAT GERMAN OFFENSIVE. ALL BUT FORGOTTEN TODAY, HIS 1926 BESTSELLER REMAINS PERHAPS THE FINEST ACCOUNT OF AMERICANS IN THE GREAT WAR.

“The book is here now: a straight-forward prose account of four battles, with infinite detail of the men and emotions in these battles, reinforced with sketches and impressions drawn upon the field.

Seventy-five years after the guns fell silent along the Western Front, the work they did there remains of incalculable importance to the age we inhabit and the people we are.

In many ways, 1918 is closer to us than we are inclined to think.

The sad lessons of 1919 are eloquent regarding today’s endlessly wretched situation in the Balkans.

The chronicles of our time will someday record how President Clinton struggled in the earliest months of his administration to find an appropriate response for the United States to the civil war and “ethnic cleansing” taking place in Bosnia.
Shakespeare—that master limner of the ways of kings—probed the frequent conflict between sovereigns and their heirs- apparent in Henry IV, Part I.

75 years ago this spring, a very different America waded into the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century. World War I did more than kill millions of people; it destroyed the West’s faith in the very institutions that had made it the hope and envy of the world.

?Many ingenious lovely things are gone that seemed sheer miracle to the multitude…" — W. B. Yeats
One of my favorite quotations from Finley Peter Dunne’s inimitable bartender “Mr. Dooley” occurs when his friend Mr. Hennessy walks into the saloon just after the 1898 liberation of Cuba from Spain. “I see where th’ war is over,” says Hennessy, beaming.

Walt Whitman said, “The real war will never get in the books.” The critic and writer Paul Fussell feels that the same sanitizing of history that went on after the 1860s has erased the national memory of what World War II was really like.

The big push” is how the G-3 journal of the 103d Infantry Division described its attack against elements of the German 19th Army on November 16, 1944. At H-plus-15, American guns bombarded enemy lines, and the regiments moved forward.

It was born in America, it came of age in America, and, in an era when foreign competition threatens so many of our industries, it still sweetens our balance of trade.

The candy bar as we know it was born in America. So too, many centuries earlier, was chocolate itself. Mexican natives cultivated the cocoa bean for more than 2500 years before Hernán Cortés took it to Spain with him in 1528.

An extraordinary World War I naval operation is recounted by the commander of a decaying coastal steamer crammed with a terrifying new explosive

When my father, Rear Adm. D. Pratt Mannix 3rd, died in 1957, he had served as a midshipman on a square-rigger and lived to see the atomic bomb dropped on Japan.

Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think

FEW ARE AWARE of a major publishing project that has been sponsored by the federal government and some of our leading citizens over the past eight decades.

In the Meuse-Argonne, this backwoods pacifist did what Marshal Foch saw as “the greatest thing accomplished by any private’ soldier of all the armies of Europe.”

Pershing called him “the greatest civilian soldier” of World War I. Foch described his exploit in the Argonne as “the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all the armies of Europe.”

A World War I soldier writes home about the Christmas holiday in his hospital, "one of the merriest, happiest seasons of my life"

For years passengers travelling the railroad between New York City and Albany were stirred from their reveries by a Scottish castle looming suddenly from the Hudson River. An outpost of nearby West Point?

SENT ON A HOPELESSLY VAGUE ASSIGNMENT BY WOODROW WILSON, AMERICAN SOLDIERS FOUND THEMSELVES IN THE MIDDLE OF A FEROCIOUS SQUABBLE AMONG BOLSHEVIKS, COSSACKS, CZECHS, JAPANESE, AND OTHERS

During mid-August, 1918, American forces began landing at Vladivostok, the capital of the Soviet Maritime Territory, in one of the more curious side shows of the First World War.

A Marine Remembers the Battle for Belleau Wood

A young poet’s memories of the old rural America in whose fields he worked for two sunny months while awaiting the call to service in the First World War

The doughboys numbered only 550 men -- the remnants of four battalions -- and were surrounded by Germans. Then they were given the order to attack.

In the early fall of 1918 five hundred American infantrymen were cut off from their regiment and surrounded by Germans during five days of fighting in the Argonne Forest.

It became apparent that this influenza was a first-rate killer.

In the last week of October, 1918, 2,700 Americans died “over there” in battle against the kaiser’s army. The same week 21,000 Americans died of influenza in the United States.

HOW TWO FAMOUS FIGURES OF THE TWENTIES GREW UP, MET, AND FELL IN LOVE

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. …” It was an odd way for a rich and world-famous young writer to end his third novel— The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Carl Fisher thought Americans should be able to drive across their country, but it took a decade and a world war to finish his road

When Carl Graham Fisher, best known as the builder and promoter of Miami Beach who started the Florida vacation craze, died in 1939 the New York Times pointed out that he brought about a far more significant change in the life-style of modern America in his earlier and less conspicuous role as the creator of the idea of the Lincoln Highway, the first automobile road from New York to California.

EQUIPMENT WAS HARD TO COME BY, RED TAPE WAS RAMPANT. BUT AMERICAN VOLUNTEERS IN FRANCE BUILT AN AMBULANCE CORPS THAT PERFORMED BRILLIANTLY IN THE EARLY YEARS OF WORLD WAR I

“Who knows?” Piatt Andrew wrote Isabella Stewart Gardner from shipboard on Christmas night of 1914, “we may spend the winter carting the groceries from Paris to Neuilly.” He had volunteered to drive an ambulance for the American Hospital in France, but beyond that his prospects
Charlie and I first met under the most informal conditions imaginable—we were both stark naked.

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