He was a stubby-tailed stray of no particular breed, wandering a college football field in 1917 when a young soldier gave him a scrap of food. Eighteen months later that same dog had survived seventeen battles on the Western Front, warned his regiment of gas attacks, single-handedly captured a German soldier, and come home the most decorated war dog in American history. This is the story of Sergeant Stubby.
For a few frozen hours in December 1914, soldiers who had been killing each other climbed out of their trenches to sing carols, bury their dead, and shake hands in no man’s land. It happened only once at that scale, and the generals made sure of it.
When the First World War broke out, the world’s most famous scientist did not retreat to her laboratory. Marie Curie taught herself to drive, built a fleet of X-ray trucks, and took them to the front — where they helped image more than a million wounded men.
On a cold December morning in 1917, a burning munitions ship drew crowds to their windows. Then the north end of Halifax simply ceased to exist — nearly 2,000 dead in the largest man-made explosion the world had yet known.
Long before it was a profession with clinics and degrees, physiotherapy was a fencing master’s idea in Stockholm and, a century later, an army of women rebuilding broken soldiers by hand. This is how healing through movement became a science.
Just after two in the morning, New York Harbor turned to daylight. A munitions depot the size of a small town had detonated, hurling shrapnel into the Statue of Liberty and shattering windows across two cities. It was no accident. It was an act of war, carried out on American soil while the nation still believed itself safely neutral. This is the story of the Black Tom explosion.
