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Inside This Issue
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My Favorite Teacher
Test Your Athletic Prowess The Law Is Not Enough
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Don’t Become a Parking Lot Vulture Avocado and Cucumber Cold Soup
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August 1914
This Month in History August 1914 August 1914 may be the most important August in history. Earlier that summer, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in Sarajevo (in an attempt that was almost botched but was ultimately successful). Tensions that had been simmering in Europe for years began to boil over, and in August the first shots were fired — the beginning of World War I. Patriotic and nationalistic jingoism amongst European nations soon turned to horror as the full picture of mechanized slaughter became clear to all. By the end of the year, a million European soldiers and citizens had been killed in the trenches and city streets. They were the first casualties of a war that would claim the lives of 16 million — and the souls of a rapidly globalizing world. and disease, as famine encroached upon the civilian populations of Central Europe.” Blockades on some countries, especially Germany, were not lifted after the war ended in 1918. Punitive measures like these were designed to prevent Germany from rising again. Instead, they resulted in needless death and more tensions between Germany and the rest of the world, which ultimately led to the Second World War a few decades later. Some countries fared better. America and Canada, untouched at home across the Atlantic, found what Canadian Lieutenant Timothy C. Winegard describes as “a context of nationhood and a sense of pride in an achievement” as new-world nations testing their headed for the trenches. It was a lesson the world would never forget, even when war broke out again two decades later.
mettle. They had no food shortages, and the war boosted their economies. This was particularly true in America, which entered the war relatively late for the final effort to topple the German alliance. It was the United States’ first European intervention. But in August 1914, nobody knew any of that. Not the world leaders, not the men and women back home, and certainly not the millions of soldiers
While young men were being cut down by the newest technology in the trenches, the folks back home in many European nations were being cut down by famine and disease. The war put immense pressure on lines of supply, pressure that was intensified by intentional blockades of civilian food supplies by both sides of the conflict. Historian N.P. Howard writes that these blockades “spread death
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