During World War I the American Library Association undertook a massive campaign to get reading material in the hands of our soldiers. One of their initiatives to bolster Army libraries was to set-up camp outside the New York Public Library. These images portray the campaign's efforts and astounding success. The history of these efforts is covered in-depth in the seminal work by Theodore Wesley Koch; Books in the War: The Romance of the Library War Service that was published in 1919 by Houghton Mifflin. cover of Books in War courtesy of book patrol In the upper-left corner of the first image above...
The Sex Lives of Civil War Soldiers
Johnny Reb and Billy Yank had a secret life, one that they and their families tried to hide from posterity and Ken Burns.They largely succeeded. Most men left no record of their sexual activities, or if they did, their survivors expurgated or expunged the record through destruction; the reality was a bit too seamy for pure sensibilities, legacies needed to be protected. Reports of wild times and venereal disease were not likely to be appreciated by descendants.Thus the Civil, our most holy, War, ennobled at the time and forevermore as a moral cause by both sides, has been stripped of...