Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceas...

John Stanhope Baines, a Winchester classical scholar and young Royal Engineers officer, was on active service in France and Salonika during the First World War. Throughout this time he wrote to his "Dearest Mother", who had studied classics at Cambri...

The Battle of Kursk, despite the seven decades that have passed since the event, continues to attract great attention even today. The combat operations, which unfolded in the summer of 1943 in the center of the Eastern Front, by their scale, the forc...

Before skyscrapers and streetlights glowed at all hours, American cities fell into inky blackness with each setting of the sun. But over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, new technologies began to light up streets, sidewalks,...

While the specificities of individual wars vary, they share a ubiquitous aftermath: the task of finding and identifying the "disappeared". The Bosnian war of the early 1990s that destroyed the sovereign state of Yugoslavia is no exception. In Working...

"Why are Kazakhstan and Montana the same place?" asks one chapter of Kate Brown's surprising and unusual journey into the histories of places on the margins, overlooked or erased. It turns out that a ruined mining town in Kazakhstan and Butte, Montan...

George I. Sanchez was a reformer, activist and intellectual, and one of the most influential members of the "Mexican American Generation" (1930-1960). A professor of education at the University of Texas from the beginning of World War II until the ea...

The Roman poet and satirist Persius (34-62 CE) was unique among his peers for lampooning literary and social conventions from a distinctly Stoic point of view. A curious amalgam of mocking wit and philosophy, his Satires are rife with violent metapho...

The Wars for Independence, also called the First and the Second Serbo-Turkish Wars 1876-1878, were the first military conflicts in the modern history of the Serbian state, after which the Principality of Serbia gained full independence at the Berlin...

Few episodes in warfare are as famous as the evacuation of the British expeditionary force and many French troops from Dunkirk. It was a very British success, pulling something of a victory from the jaws of defeat – a triumph in the face of catastrop...