Before the GI Bill: The American Expeditionary Forces University

As far as I’m concerned one of the joys of poking about in the historical record is stumbling across tidbits that don’t make it into big picture accounts of historical events. Sometimes they don’t even make it into the smaller-scale stories that I am working on. This is one of those tidbits. It caught my…

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Civilian Internment Camps in World War I (Not a Typo)

  Until recently, I thought of internment camps only in terms of the shameful removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans by the United States government, which saw concentrated populations of people of Japanese descent as a security risk, based on no evidence what so ever.* Several years ago, thanks to the excellent BBC mystery series…

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Damon Runyon is Not Ring Lardner

This post has its roots in one simple fact: Damon Runyon is not Ring Lardner. Or perhaps I should say that Ring Lardner is not Damon Runyon. As I mentioned in my last blog post: I mixed the two men up in my head. My fingers typed Ring Lardner in my original notes but my…

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