WETA Arts, a half-hour magazine-style show featuring Washington, DC-area arts and artists, will lead the July edition with an encore presentation of “James Reese Europe”, the story of a renowned jazz bandleader and commander of an all-Black unit in World War I, featuring The Kennedy Center’s Artistic Director for Jazz, Jason Moran, and the reenactment band The 369^th Experience, The band was sponsored by the U.S. World War I Centennial Commission. The original episode segment can be viewed here:https://watch.weta.org/video/weta-arts-february-2019-ozigr4/  The new episode will feature an amazing group of additional DC-local Black artists, as well, and will be streaming  on the WETA website https://weta.org/arts and via the PBS Passport app, starting July 5 at 7:30 p.m. EDT.

By his own admission, Ph.D. student Mark Hauser "knew very little about the First World War before I began graduate school, but I was always vaguely aware it was important."  Mark's recently completed dissertation provides an interesting new perspective on just how important the war was to America, making the case "that World War I changed Americans’ relationship to mass culture is both a history of the military and a business history."  Click here to read more about how Mark's research illuminated a relatively unexplored aspect of the impact of World War I on America.

A woman and her husband in northeast Maryland found a live World War I artillery shell while digging in a flower bed. After the startling discovery, Kelly and Shannon Thomas, of Belair, MD, left the round where they found it and called the Harford County Sheriff’s Office. “After examining the device, it was determined that the best course of action was to conduct an emergency disposal to render the ordnance safe,” the Maryland Office of the State Fire Marshal said in a news release. “Bomb Technicians disposed of the potentially dangerous round on the scene.” Click here to read more about this very unexpected find of a "connection" to World War I for a suburban household a century later.

It was a single gravestone that prompted Carolyn Warren Bessellieu’s sometimes challenging, sometimes emotional, but satisfying quest for African American World War I service information. The discovery in "an unmarked African American cemetery" of a headstone of a WWI veteran named Tobie Harris started Bessellieu’s quest. "My great-uncle Holiday Bennett use to tell me many stories of World War II. I was fascinated to see what I could find on those who served in WWI.” Click here to read more about Bessellieu’s research, and how it led to a personal discovery of her own family's connection to World War I..

On May 28 1917, less than two months after the United States entered World War I on the side of the Allies, 191 U.S. Army officers and men led by Maj. Gen. John J. Pershing boarded the British ocean liner RMS Baltic and sailed for England. President Woodrow Wilson had dispatched this group as the nucleus of the American Expeditionary Forces, an army that eventually comprised over one million American soldiers in Europe. Writing in Army History Magazine, author Tyler Bamford takes an in-depth look at how this unprecedented interaction with the armed forces of allied nations helped prepare U.S. forces for "an enormous task for which the U.S. Army possessed little institutional experience." Click here to read more about what they learned, and how the hasty U.S. and British Army introduction to cooperation during World War I "laid the foundations for the unique, informal Anglo-American military relationship in the interwar period."

When the United States entered World War I in April of 1917, New York Life shared the nation’s fighting spirit and rallied to help mobilize America’s troops. The company offered its deep financial and human resources to support the war effort. And the volunteerism born then—from fundraising to moral support to military service—would live on as an abiding value for decades to come. Click here to read more about how the culture of the company, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, was shaped by the organization's experiences in World War I.

Writing for the H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online web site of the University of Michigan, reviewer Matthew Villeneuve looks at Thomas Grillot's book First Americans, calling it "a study of Indigenous patriotism in the aftermath of World War I. While the historiography on American Indian participation in the First World War often focuses on the battlefield experience of Indigenous people, Grillot's study examines the ways Indigenous veterans, along with their Euro-American comrades, made meaning out of Indigenous participation in the War to End All Wars after the armistice."  Click here to read more about how Grillot's book "sheds light on the process by which the symbolic repertoire for the expression of Indigenous pride came to include such icons as the American flag, citizenship, and the figure of the GI." in the war's aftermath.

The National WWI Museum and Memorial announced a grant for $125,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to digitize and transcribe letters, diaries, and journals from soldiers and family members originated from World War I. “This gift is essential as it allows the organization to take a major step forward in our efforts to digitize and transcribe our entire collection of letters, diaries and journal entries from the Great War, “said Museum President and CEO Dr. Matthew Naylor. “Making the content from these incredible first-person accounts available is important because it allows people to connect with those who experienced the 20th century’s founding catastrophe.” Click here to read more about the grant, and how it will support and further the work taken on by the Museum while it was shut down for the COVID pandemic.

Dogs are man’s best friend, and at times that means we have brought them with us into the worst parts of what we do. The use of dogs in war is nothing new, but their role changed over time. In the First World War dogs were used extensively by all sides, with different breeds managing different roles. Emily Green, Founder and Chief Editor of the DoggieDesigner.com web site, takes a look at five specific breeds which played (sometimes outsized) roles for American and other military forces in World War I.

One woman is named on the Cole County, MO World War I Memorial at the courthouse. Grace Hershey was a stenographer with the American Red Cross. Highly praised for her clerical skills in contests and courtrooms, the 31-year-old took a significant pay cut when she left her job with the state insurance department to go overseas. Her fiancé, Thorpe Gordon, had deployed to France in August 1918. Click here to read more about how her departure only a month later was "her patriotic duty to do what she can to help win the war."

Andrew Capets’ initial interest in World War I was finding out more about his grandfather’s unit, the 313th Machine Gun Battalion. That research led the North Huntingdon resident and amateur historian to write “Good War, Great Men,” which focused on his grandfather’s battalion and its exploits. Now, Capets has joined with a Nebraska man on a new WWI project: creating a searchable database of soldiers’ burial cards, some of which will be linked to a digital map showing where those soldiers are buried. Click here to read more about this grassroots effort to make World War I burial records more accessible to families and other researchers.

As the nation continues to deal with the effects of COVID-19 influenza pandemic in 2020, a look back at the American experiences with the great Spanish Flu Pandemic during World War I can provide remarkable reminders of how a similar scourge was dealt with a century ago.

Navy, Marines Struggled With 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Remembering WWI soldiers who succumbed to the 1918 flu

As the 1918 Flu Emerged, Cover-Up, Denial Helped Spread

The Pandemic to End All Pandemics?: World War I, the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, and Urban America

1918: A Study in How Disease Can Shape Public Policy

Reading your own obituary: Samuel Bustard, the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and the evolution of New York Metro Area soccer through World War I

Paul LaRue, former member of the
Ohio World War I Centennial Committee, writes that "A unique monument stands in the rural French countryside. It is a monument to the 372nd Infantry, an African American World War I combat regiment. The 372nd Infantry Monument represents one of the earliest monuments erected to African American World War I Troops." Click here to read more about the 372nd, and how those who served in it "understood the significance of their service, and wanted to leave a monument in France to their fallen comrades."

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