Drawing on the personal diaries and letters of Australian nurse Susie Cone, Native American volunteer Lutiant LaVoye, and chief nurse Julia Stimson, this article reconstructs the harrowing experience of women nurses during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, revealing the exhaustion, fear, and resilience recorded in their own words.
In 1947, India gained independence from British rule, but the partition of the subcontinent brought unprecedented violence and migration. This article explores the events, daily life, and primary sources of that transformative year.
Drawing on contemporary New York Times reports from September and November 1973, this article examines how the paper covered the Chilean coup that ousted Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power. It reveals what readers knew, what the Times got wrong, and how the coverage evolved.
Drawing on the dispatches of Henry Buckley, the memoirs collected by Paul Preston, and the censorship files of both warring factions, this article reconstructs how the world’s journalists reported the Spanish Civil War — and how their biases shaped what millions of readers believed.
In the 1930s, radio news emerged from a bitter war with newspapers to become a dominant source of information, reshaping how Americans experienced the world. Drawing on contemporary accounts, this article reveals the fears, expectations, and daily realities of a nation tuning in to the new medium.
Drawing on Robert F. Kennedy’s memoir, the White House tapes, and the JFK Library, this article reconstructs the thirteen days of October 1962 as they were experienced by contemporaries—the fear, the secrecy, and the diplomacy that brought the world back from the brink.
Explore the First World War as it was experienced and reported by those who lived it, through letters, diaries, newspaper front pages, and official documents preserved in digital archives.
Drawing on official sanitary reports, colonial dispatches, and firsthand accounts, this article reconstructs how India experienced the 1918 influenza pandemic—the terror, the confusion, and the staggering death toll that made it the worst-hit country in the world.
Before television, Americans watched the world unfold in the flickering light of newsreel theaters. Drawing on a 1932 Time magazine report and modern scholarship, this article reconstructs the experience of these small, continuous-showing theaters that made global events immediate and public.
Drawing exclusively on 1919 newspapers, official records, and eyewitness accounts, this article reconstructs how the Treaty of Versailles was reported, received, and understood at the moment of its creation—from the opening of the Paris Peace Conference to the signing in the Hall of Mirrors and the global reaction that followed.