Month: April 2018
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Spies and Plotters
What’s the best way to handle and punish spies who give information to America’s enemies? In World War I, the different options split the country. On one side was Sen. George Chamberlain (D-OR), whose bill introduced in Congress would have tried spies by court martial. On the other side was President Woodrow Wilson, a fellow […]
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World’s Scientists in Life-and-Death Race
“These pictures are six months old,” says a quote from an army officer to begin this 1918 article, “so the devices they show are, of course, perfectly obsolete.” World War I sparked a massive technological boom, a silver lining to an otherwise horrific blemish on humanity’s history. That would come to be true of World […]
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The Atlas of Modern War
What was the cause of surging American military superiority in 1918? New York University Mechanical Engineering Professor Collins P. Bliss outlined how the prior century had been a frenzy of technological development in the art of warfare. (Including the usage of the phrase “motor traction” in the very early years of vehicles, before we’d really settled […]
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Baseball as Means of Keeping the Doctor Away
With the MLB season just resuming again last week, let’s take a trip back to 1918, when the two biggest sports were baseball and boxing. Basketball and football were very much secondary on the popularity scale. A recent conversation with my brother speculated about which people from 2018 would still be remembered by the general […]