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A local domestic casualty of the World War I draft

No one can guess what Melvin Lunda was thinking as he walked to work in downtown Sioux Falls on Thursday, June 20, 1918. Certainly, though, the 28-year-old couldn’t have imagined he would be a domestic fatality of World War I before the day ended. Lunda was what we now call collateral damage brought about by […]

Book Review: Crowns in Conflict by Theo Aronson

While reading Theo Aronson’s Crowns in Conflict: The Triumph and Tragedy of European Monarchy 1910-1918, an essentially biographic approach to World War I’s effect on Europe’s monarchies, I often thought of another book I read years ago. The Fall of Eagles, C.L.Suzberger’s account of the fall of the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov dynasties, was on […]

Book Review: Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

The December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor changed America and Hollywood was no exception. Less than three months earlier, A U.S. Senate subcommittee held hearings on whether Hollywood was intentionally producing “propaganda” to encourage the country to enter the war in Europe. Pearl Harbor brought that investigation to a halt and within 10 days […]

Yielding our freedoms: Deutsche verboten

Words can be dangerous. You know, “the pen is mightier than the sword” and all that. But entire languages? During World War I, plenty of people thought speaking German was anti-American. Many states, including South Dakota, thought it so unpatriotic that they banned the language.

As I noted previously, the South Dakota Council of Defense […]

Yielding our freedoms: Meet the State Council of Defense

As noted in the last post, concern about American “preparedness” after the First World War started led to a variety of government action. One was the formation of the Council of National Defense, which was to coordinate industries and resources “for the national security and welfare.”

Although created in August 1916, the Council wasn’t […]