Reading time: 5 minutes
The only extended campaign American soldiers fought as an independent force during the first world war was the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Launched in late September 1918 as part of the final allied offensive on the western front, it was the largest and most deadly campaign the US army had ever fought.
Reading time: 5 minutes
Napoleon Bonaparte may have died 200 years ago, but the vast ramifications of his rule can still be felt – and not only in France. This year marks the last in a series of bicentenaries since 1969, the 200th anniversary of his birth, but the chance to give the most famous emperor in French history another send-off is proving distinctly tricky – and not only because of COVID-19 restrictions.
Reading time: 14 minutes Bob Denard had not quite reached his 32nd birthday when a newspaper...
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Reading time: 6 minutes
The Wars of the Roses are normally portrayed as a series of battles between two warring houses, York and Lancaster, over who was rightly king of England. However, they were about much more than that. In many ways, the wars were really about standards of government.
Reading time: 7 minutes
Nancy Wake (1912–2011) was an agent for the Special Operations Executive and the most wanted woman in France during the Second World War. Dubbed the ‘White Mouse’ by the Nazis, she was the one who always got away.
Reading time: 5 minutes
Nations establish their borders through treaties. Rivers are sometimes relied on to set boundaries, but even here tensions rise when there are disputes about interpretation. Is the boundary on the river banks, the deepest part of the river, or the very centre of the flow?
Reading time: 6 minutes
In the early decades of the 20th century, modernism forever changed artistic representation. Artists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, whose experiments formed the foundations of Cubism, were just some of the many innovators responding to changes in technology and urbanization.
Picasso is possibly one of the most well-known artists today, and much is known about his life and inspirations. However, one influence behind his innovative style is less explored in popular culture—the impact of colonialism. The cubist movement arguably would not be what it became without the legacies of colonialism and imperial conquest.
Reading time: 7 minutes
While this may be true, Sykes-Picot is still emblematic of how consequential European colonial ambition was in the Middle East. And while the borders outlined in the agreement did not eventuate, Britain and France still managed to get most of the territory they wanted, with little consideration of local populations. The Sykes-Picot agreement is therefore one of many colonial projects that we are still feeling the ripples of today.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Our views of war are sanitised today. In an age of professional armies trained for increasingly technical tasks, few of us have witnessed combat, much less taken part in it. In that vein, commemorations of the 200th anniversary of Waterloo will focus on the battle’s strategic significance. There are, though, individual accounts that give us a glimpse into what sword fights and cavalry charges must have been like – and the deadly consequences of defeat.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Many factors contributed to making the Gallipoli battlefield an almost unendurable place for all soldiers. The constant noise, cramped unsanitary conditions, disease, stenches, daily death of comrades, terrible food, lack of rest and thirst all contributed to the most gruelling conditions.
Reading time: 6 minutes
Type “Holy Grail” into Google and … well, you probably don’t need me to finish that sentence. The sheer multiplicity of what any search engine throws up demonstrates that there is no clear consensus as to what the Grail is or was. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people out there claiming to know its history, true meaning and even where to find it.
Reading time: 6 minutes
In the waning hours of the war, exactly five days after Hitler shot himself in his bunker, a bizarre battle would commence in a small Austrian town, just south of the German border.
Seven hundred years after its construction in the 1200s, Castle Itter would host a battle between the Waffen-SS (the Nazi party’s specialist paramilitary) and a combined force of defecting German Wehrmacht troops, American soldiers, Austrian resistance fighters, and various French political prisoners.
