American Journalists and the Great War

One of the challenges of writing history is deciding where the story starts. For me that not only means deciding where I begin telling the story, but how much of the backstory I need to understand. The short answer is, a lot. I am never comfortable making broad generalizations based on other people’s broad generalizations.…

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Bella Fromm’s Berlin Social Diary

Over the last four years, I’ve read a lot of memoirs and diaries written by people who lived in Berlin in the period between the two world wars. They are a wonderful source to use to enrich a story. They not only allow you to look at incidents from different perspectives but, depending on the…

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“From Across the Sea”

In November , 1933, the Chicago Tribune began running an occasional column titled “From Across the Sea” featuring reported think pieces by correspondents of the Tribune’s Foreign News Service. The column ran on the editorial page along with letters to the editor and other columns such as the whimsical “A Line O’Type or Two.”* Sigrid…

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