More in ‘World War I’

If kids say the darnedest things, they’re bound to get even darned-er if you feed them funny potential answers to serious questions: A multiple-choice survey of 2,000 9- to 15-year-old children in the United Kingdom found that “while a majority of children have basic knowledge about the two world wars, a significant minority have no ...

A week before Germany’s invasion of Poland, Hitler reportedly urged his generals to slaughter civilians—Slavs and Jews, the two most hated groups in Nazi ideology—without mercy. “After all,” he flippantly asked, “who remembers the Armenians?” In fact, the attempted genocide of the Armenians by the Turks during the First World War was very well documented, ...

In 1885, a Lithuanian Jew named Barnett Rosenberg left his hometown of Devinsk, hoping like many Jewish emigrants to avoid conscription into the brutal Russian Army. His plan was to go to America, but by the time he made it to the port city of Hull, England, his money had run out; so, like a ...

Inside the Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem, 1914
When Amy Dockser Marcus began reporting from Israel for the Wall Street Journal, in the early 1990s, a lasting peace agreement seemed not only possible, but likely. By the time she left, in 1998, the situation looked as bleak as ever.
Yet even as the mood darkened, Dockser Marcus found ...

U.S. Army Educational Commission poster, 1918.
Like the heroines in the sensational dime novels she devours, Frieda Mintz—the main character of Michael Lowenthal’s third novel, Charity Girl—is a young, working-class girl trying to make her living. Set in 1918 Boston, the novel follows Frieda as she runs away from home and falls in love with Felix ...