The Last Battle of the First World War

March 18, 1879. A crowd gathers around an indoor track in Brooklyn, NY, as an Irish immigrant named Bartholomew O’Donnell attempts a strange feat: walking 80 miles in 26 hours. Newspapers claim he’s eighty years old. Lap after lap, he circles the track: smoking a pipe, sipping ho ...  Show more

Why did Orson Welles take on a murder mystery? Listen for yourself. This week, we're sharing a special preview of Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier from the podcast Radio Diaries. In this series, we learn how Welles used his platform to shed light on a crime in a small, southern ...  Show more

As some of you may know, I am also a First World War historian, and the academic history of the war can be very different from the public perspective, which dwells on the first two years of the war. 

Forgetting the victories of 1917 and 1918 is not new; it is something ...

On September 1 1939 Nazi Germany invaded Poland followed two days later by France and the United Kingdom declaring war on Germany and beginning the Second World War. This was the opening act in what would be the most devastating clash in human history. By its end Europe and much ...  Show more

The Second World War officially ended on September 2nd 1945 - and it's estimated that around 3% of the Earth's population perished during the conflict. But what ultimately bought WW2 to an end - and how vital a role did the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki play in obtaining a J ...  Show more

In Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age to Defeat the German Army in World War I (NAL Caliber, 2016), National Archives historian and forensic archivist Mitchell Yockelson reappraises the American Expeditionary Force’s performance under the command of General Joh ...  Show more