Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I

I must admit, Alexander Watson’s Ring of Steel has been sitting on my To-Be-Read shelves since 2014. I received it from a publisher who hoped I would review it. I was in over my head on a writing project that had nothing do with World War I. Read a 500+ page book with no immediate…

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Shin-Kickers From History:Celebrate People’s History

The Celebrate People’s History project began in 1998. In the dead of the night, activist Josh MacPhee, aided by a half-dozen co-conspirators, pasted images of Malcolm X on boarded-up storefronts in Chicago’s West Side. Ten minutes after they started, they had attracted a small crowd of neighborhood residents. Some of them helped put up posters.…

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Déjà Vu All Over Again: The Bonus Expeditionary Forces March on Washington

And while we’re talking about failures of compassion and the Great Depression, as I believe we were, consider the example of the Bonus Expeditionary Forces’ march on Washington—a story with uncomfortable modern-day echoes Bonus payments to World War I veterans were a hot political subject in the years after 1919. Congress passed bills approving bonuses…

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