How Black homesteaders built a town in Nicodemus Kansas
Nicodemus is still there, on the high plains of Graham County in northwestern Kansas. It is a National Historic Site now, with a handful of residents and five historic buildings,…
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How Vietnam veterans built the first Vet Centers
If you have ever sat in a Vet Center, you were sitting in something that exists because a previous generation of veterans refused to stop asking for it.
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How to read a nineteenth century company ledger
A ledger is not a story. It is a list of numbers kept by a bookkeeper who assumed everyone reading it already knew what the numbers meant.
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How boundary disputes shaped early Maine coastal towns
The property lines in a coastal Maine town do not look like the lines in an Ohio county, and the reason is that Maine was divided up before anyone had a system for doing it.
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What we actually know about women who enlisted in disguise
This is a subject where the popular literature and the documentary record have drifted a long way apart, and I want to walk through both, because the real version is more…
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How the USS Samuel B Roberts DE 413 fought battleships
A destroyer escort was not built to fight a battleship. She was built to shepherd convoys and hunt submarines, cheaply and in quantity, and the design reflects exactly that.
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Why the ironclad USS Baron DeKalb was so vulnerable from below
The Baron DeKalb was sunk in July 1863 in the Yazoo River, and she was not sunk by gunfire. She was sunk by what the period called torpedoes and what we would call mines.
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What happened to the refugee camps of the Civil War
They were called contraband camps, and the name comes from a legal argument rather than from anything humane.
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Why the GI Bill changed for Korean War veterans
The 1944 GI Bill is one of the most consequential pieces of American domestic legislation of the twentieth century. The version Korean War veterans got was noticeably less…
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Why the USS Becuna SS 319 was rebuilt for the Cold War
The Becuna is moored in Philadelphia next to the cruiser Olympia, and most visitors walk through her in fifteen minutes without realising they are looking at two different…
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The design flaws that doomed the airship USS Akron ZRS 4
The Akron went into the Atlantic off the New Jersey coast in the early hours of 4 April 1933. Seventy-three men died. Three survived.
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How the early burn pits in Iraq affected veteran health
Every base I was on had one. A hole in the ground, sometimes the size of a football field, burning everything the base produced, with jet fuel used as an accelerant.
