By Ben Marks — This year marks the centennial of the Christmas Truce of 1914, in which pockets of German, British, and French troops along the Western Front laid down their arms to share cigarettes, bury their dead, and sing Christmas carols—in some places for a few hours, in others for several days. Between July 28, 1914 and November 11, 1918, World War I claimed upwards of 20 million lives. As a small pause in the carnage, the Christmas Truce was a fleeting moment of humanity amid unimaginable...

Women and Children: The Secret Weapons of World War I Propaganda Posters

By Ben Marks — Armistice Day is a time to reflect upon that defining moment at the end of World War I, at 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, when soldiers stopped shooting at each other along Europe's Western Front. At its close, most observers assumed that nothing would ever match the "Great War" for its sheer volumes of death and destruction, and for decades after, people around the world stopped whatever they were doing at that hour to observe two minutes of silence in a mute echo of the quiet that must have...

War and Prosthetics: How Veterans Fought for the Perfect Artificial Limb

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — There's something undeniably beautiful about prosthetic limbs, designed to echo the physical grace and mechanical engineering of the human body. For most people, these objects elicit some combination of squeamish discomfort and utmost respect. But far fewer of us connect those feelings to the untold generations of battle-scarred amputees whose sacrifices made prosthetics a public priority. "Patients even have doctors sign non-disclosure forms to protect potential patents." “You hate to...