The Hat in the Ring Squadron

If you’re a serious aviation buff, or perhaps a WWI buff, you may already know all this, but it was new to me. The “Hat in the Ring”* Squadron was the nickname for the 94th Aero Squadron of the United States Army Air Service (USAAS) during World War I. Formed at Kelly Field in Texas,…

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Before the GI Bill: The American Expeditionary Forces University

As far as I’m concerned one of the joys of poking about in the historical record is stumbling across tidbits that don’t make it into big picture accounts of historical events. Sometimes they don’t even make it into the smaller-scale stories that I am working on. This is one of those tidbits. It caught my…

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The Lost Generation, the Paris Edition, and James Thurber

As I dig into the story of American journalism in Europe after the Great War,* there are several themes/topics that are unavoidable: Paris, the Lost Generation, and the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune among them.** One of the things that became clear early on is that the popular image of the Lost Generation is…

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