sutton039

Heather Cox Richardson The guns in Europe fell silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918. George Lawrence Price But that was three minutes too late for Canadian Private George Lawrence Price, serving in Belgium, who was shot by a German sniper at 10:57 and died a minute later. Ten minutes before the armistice, Price and two other men in his company had begun to search homes from which Germans had just been firing machine guns. They found only civilians in the first two homes they searched. As they stepped back into the street, a single shot hit Price in the chest. He fell into the arms of his comrade, who pulled him back into the house they had just left. As Price died, German soldiers cleared their guns in a last burst of machine gun fire that greeted the armistice. Price’s commanding officer was furious that the men had taken it upon themselves to search the houses, commenting “Hell of a note, to think that that would happen right when the war’s ov...

Randall Stephens The Response by Sir William Goscombe John. Unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1923. Ernest Hemingway didn't mince words.  The author of A Farewell to Arms claimed that World War I "was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied . So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought."  Seeing the ravages of war up close, he served with distinction as an ambulance driver in Italy .  Gertrude Stein coined the phrase "lost generation," which applied to Hemingway and other wayward souls like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. What accounts for the gap between Hemingway's tone and the gallant, heroic one of war memorials?  Did region have a role to play in war remembrance?  How do we make sense of the conflict now that the last veterans have passed away ? As we near the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I Don Yerxa has been conducting a s...

Randall Stephens In not too long Project Muse will post the June issue of Historically Speaking .  In the meantime, copies are being shipped across the country and overseas to subscribers.  The latest issue contains a lively range of essays.  This month we have the last of Joe Amato's three essays on revitalizing local history. Here he sketches a sensory history of 20th-century rural America. He then explores some causes and effects of the countryside’s marginalization in modern American society. On a related note, Don Yerxa interviews Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen about sense history.  Classen has written extensively on the senses, exploring the lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity and helping us appreciate the tactile foundations of Western culture.   Also in this issue are pieces on history and political thought, Mormon historical studies, Stalin and Nazi Germany, Civil War naval history, Britain and the Treat...

Randall Stephens While I'm at an American Studies conference in Sweden, the blog will be taking a short break.  In the meantime, have a look at this two past posts that deal with Memorial Day: Heather Cox Richardson, "A Thank You to Our Troops—All of Them—on this Memorial Day," May 30, 2011 Memorial Day came out of the Decoration Days held after the Civil War. This seems like a logical thing for me, a scholar of nineteenth century America, to write about today. Instead, though, I’d like to talk about a group of soldiers that often gets forgotten when we remember our troops. I mean the WACs, the more than 150,000 women who served in the U.S. Army during World War II. >>> Randall Stephens, "The History of Memorial Day and the National World War One Museum, Kansas City," May 23, 2009 As Americans cram their faces with hot dogs and swill cheap beer, many will also reflect on the heroic efforts of countless men and women who have served their country over...