MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

If it hadn’t been for G. Michael Pratt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Miami in Ohio, the site of the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers—where Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the Legion of the United States decisively defeated a co

On the morning of October 29, 1865, a little more than five months after the end of the Civil War, an African-American private in the Union army named Jacob Plowden stepped out of his tent at Camp Shaw in Jacksonville, Florida, to witness a horrific

Charles Elwood “Chuck” Yeager didn’t make the record books as the highest-scoring fighter ace in American aviation history, nor was he the only hotshot test pilot to have flown the rocket-powered Bell XS-1. Yet he’s widely considered to be the greate

Allied troops in the South Pacific during World War II were bombarded with propaganda dished out over the airwaves by English-speaking women in Japan, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Although these broadcasters had different on-air names and personas

In 1939, even before Germany had completed its conquest of Poland, the Nazis began herding most of the country’s 3.3 million Jews into marked-off urban ghettos. The German occupational authorities created Judenräte (Jewish councils) made up of Jewish

The hand mortar was a visually threatening but largely impractical shoulder-fired weapon used predominantly in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, though it also made its way to the newly founded United States. At sea, hand mortars were used to th

In the chilly dawn of June 30, 1934, two black Mercedes-Benz automobiles wound their way around the misty western edge of Tegernsee Lake in the rolling Bavarian foothills roughly 30 miles south of Munich. The picturesque countryside had been a favori

John Hix was just 12 years old when the syndicated cartoon feature “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” made its newspaper debut in 1919. Amazingly, at age 20 he would land a contract with the McClure Newspaper Syndicate to go pen-to-pen with Robert Ripley.

Phil Stern is best known for his iconic portraits of such Hollywood legends as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and John Wayne. But for two years during World War II Stern put his skills as a photographer to work while traini

Captain Edward Fegen knew that the eight 6-inch guns of his thin-skinned armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay stood no chance against the approaching German pocket battleship. Jervis Bay, converted from a 14,164-ton liner, was escorting 37 cargo ships a

On a frigid December evening in 1791, a messenger arrived at the Presidential Mansion in Philadelphia, where George and Martha Washington were entertaining some guests over dinner. Tobias Lear, the president’s personal secretary, sat at the table wit

Thomas Fortescue Carter had never before worked as a war correspondent when he found himself, at age 22, covering the Anglo-Boer War of 1880–1881. “It was the first time I had been under fire,” he would write, “and I confess that the sensation was no

On August 11, 1914, His Majesty’s Regular Army took out a full-page advertisement in the London Daily Telegraph seeking the immediate enlistment of an additional 100,000 men, ages 19 to 30, to help with the “grave National Emergency” unfolding beyond

If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh. Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, the aorta’s opened valves, the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap. Here is the adrenaline rush you crave, that inexorable flight, that insane

On the evening of January 4, 1919, the prominent art critic Paul Konody met British press baron Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere, for dinner at a London restaurant. The city was awash with excitement over the official opening that evening o

By Adam Zamoyski. 784 pages. Basic Books, 2018. $40. Reviewed by Michael Leggiere “Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat,” Napoleon wrote. Not Napoleon Bonaparte; Napoleon Hill, the American self-help author