During the three years after World War II, Germans—facing a ruined economy and wildly depreciating currency—turned to cigarettes as a medium of exchange on a massive scale. Allied occupation authorities strictly forbade this black-market currency exchange, but it literally saved the lives of many German civilians—and inadvertently made many
[ This is the first post in a series. see Part Two , Part Three , Part Four , Part Five , and Part Six . ] With 2017 now upon us, we are moving toward the hundredth anniversary of direct American intervention into the Great War in April 1917. This intervention became one of those pivotal aspects of the conflict that the Great War a kind of
On the Western Front a hundred years ago, a furious and decisive campaign was in progress. The great German Spring Offensive, often and rightly called the Ludendorff Offensive, was well into the process of launching about three million combat troops against the Allied lines. The Offensive would last from March 21 to July 18, 1918. The combined
Volume 2, No. 2 (Summer 1999) It has long been recognized that the year 1916 was the turning point in World War I, the year in which, as historian René Albrecht-Carrié (1965) put it, the deeper forces broke through. This process is not nearly as mysterious as it sounds on first hearing. On the battle fronts, the bloodlettings of 1916 — Verdun, the
A surprising range of news and opinion outlets have memorialized a string of anniversaries related to the Great War over the last few months: the assassination of the Archduke, the July Crisis, the start of the war, etc. Newspapers, magazines, the blog world, the top ten list sites, and Youtube channels have all feature anniversary observations.
A surprising range of news and opinion outlets have memorialized a string of anniversaries related to the Great War over the last few months: the assassination of the Archduke, the July Crisis, the start of the war, etc. Newspapers, magazines, the blog world, the top ten list sites, and Youtube channels have all featured anniversary observations.
Editor’s Note: Hunt Tooley, Professor of History at Austin College, will be teaching “The Interwar Years” beginning on January 22 at 5:30 p.m. This six-lecture course will examine the years between the two World Wars and cover the “rebuilding” of the war-torn world, inflation and depression, financial manipulation, neo-mercantilism, and the vast
The First World War was ferocious in its first years. But the combination of sustained and enormous losses of the enormous battles of 1916 and the strains on the home fronts brought the “deeper forces” to emerge, in the words of historian René Albrecht-Carrié. The number of enormous battles—and casualties—across the military theaters in the year
Three quarters of a century ago, on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, an attack on the Soviet Union across a front 3,000 miles long. Barbarossa moved the war into its global stage. It prefigured the final alliance system. It moved the Final Solution to the industrial level of killing. It helped bring the United States into
A hundred years ago, British units (alongside a smaller French force) attacked the Germans on an eleven-mile wide front in Picardy, straddling the Somme River. The attack was the attempt to break through on the Western Front, and in accordance with emerging artillery doctrine and practice, the German lines were saturated with shells for a week in
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The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
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