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Before the continent started banning hijab, European aristocrats used to change their names to Abdullah and Muhammad, and going to the local mosque was the latest trend.From the outside, with its high minarets and bulbous Mughal-style dome, the Wilmersdorf mosque, located on Brienner Street in southwest Berlin, looks much the same as it did when it was built in the 1920s. But the institution, just like the city around it, has changed. Today, the mosque is a quiet place. It mainly serves as an information center: School children sometimes visit on field trips; it hosts interfaith brunches. A small community...

There is something hard, cold, and brutal about the structure. It looks like a concrete airplane hangar and rising above it is what is called the “Lantern of the Dead." The shape suggests, appropriately, an artillery shell. When you walk around the outside of the building you find small windows, and when you look through them what you see are bones. Human bones and skulls. Piles of them. They are the remains of more than 130,000 men who were killed here and whose bodies could not be recovered or identified and so remained in the mud, blown apart again and...

After listening to one of my favorite podcaster, Dan Carlin & his Hardcore History, about the beginning of World War I, I would love to find out more about this time in history. I know that Freepers are a well read bunch and I am asking for any recommendations you may care to make in a good book covering this time in history.

In December 1914, an unofficial Christmas truce on the Western Front allows soldiers from opposing sides of the First World War to gain insight into each others way of life. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/

The Story of the American Expeditionary Forces THE HISTORY OF THE KNIGHTS OF COLUMBUS IN WORLD WAR I   Welcoming Sign at Knights of Columbus Hut Father Duval, DSC KOC & 104th Inf. "Everyone Welcome, Everything Free" was the motto of the Knights of Columbus clubhouses which sprung up in Doughboy training camps, in major U.S. cities and wherever a Doughboy could be found. Manned by K of C secretaries who were affectionately known as "Caseys" the clubhouses provided recreation and a few of the amenities of home to any serviceman regardless of race or religion. And to Catholic...

Nearly 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, during World War I. Turks by and large do not believe mass killings were planned. CUNGUS, Turkey — The crumbling stone monastery, built into the hillside, stands as a forlorn monument to an awful past. So, too, does the decaying church on the other side of this mountain village. Farther out, a crevice is sliced into the earth, so deep that peering into it, one sees only blackness. Haunting for its history, it was there that a century ago, an untold number of Armenians were tossed...

The world is changing and becoming even more dangerous -- in a way we've seen before. In the decade before World War I, the near-hundred-year European peace that had followed the fall of Napoleon was taken for granted. Yet it abruptly imploded in 1914. Prior little wars in the Balkans had seemed to predict a much larger one on the horizon -- and were ignored. The exhausted Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were spent forces unable to control nationalist movements in their provinces. The British Empire was fading. Imperial Germany was rising. Czarist Russia was beset with revolutionary rebellion. As power...

Rochereau's books are arranged in neat piles on the mantelpiece, his collection of sabres hangs on a wall, and his bed is still covered by the same lace spread as when, nearly a century ago, he left home for the last time. A vial on the desk sports a label saying it contains "the earth of Flanders in which our dear child fell and which kept his remains for four years". On his bed the medals he was awarded for bravery, the croix de guerre and the Legion of Honour, are displayed in a glass case next to his képi...

While recently commemorating the World War I centenary at an Italian military cemetery, Pope Francis declared: "Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction." The pope's observation begs the question: If World War III has already started, would we even know it? Or would it only be evident in the rearview mirror? Ask 10 people you know to identify the thunderclap that started World War II. The answer would vary, depending on the perceptiveness of the person being asked and their geographic location....

German infantry at the Vistula River, 1916We are accustomed to thinking that such real-world physical experiences as war, defeat, and economic ruin produce such psychological, cultural, artistic, and social responses as disillusionment, frenzy (including frenzied enjoyments), and despair in the collective mind. The First World War — which, exactly 100 years later, we are now remembering, and whose lessons we are still pondering — seems to confirm and illustrate this belief. It was an event whose magnitude and impact we find hard to grasp even today. Though it began in the Balkans, it spread across the world to all continents...

Our President may be a well-educated and a very smart guy, but he seems to have skipped out on his world history classes. He certainly would have learned the absolutely true saying that “history repeats itself.” He would also know that any dithering with ISIS will only cause us more pain and lost lives in the future. History does repeat itself, and regularly. A perfect example has been on display with the debt crisis in Argentina. The country has defaulted on its debt. Its President, Cristina Kirchner, did not accept blame for the default. She pointed the finger at two...

Noted presidential historian David Pietrusza discusses the origins and development of the first World War, one hundred years ago.

SWINDON, England, July 28, 2014 /Standard Newswire/ -- 100 years ago, on 28 July 1914, the first shots of World War I were fired. Over the following four years, 16 million lives were lost as 65 million men from 32 countries were drawn into the conflict. The book that was read and cherished by people on both sides of the conflict was the Bible. To commemorate the First World War centenary, Bible Society in England and Wales has been looking back at its records to trace the extent and impact of its Scripture distribution during the war years. What they...

One of the forgotten battles of the first world war was fought for Chilean dirt. It wasn't just any dirt, though – it was caliche, a whitish substance rich in the crucial mineral sodium nitrate. Nitrates are the active ingredient of bombs and bullets.

The famed Dutch exotic dancer who was executed in 1917 in France for passing information to the Germans was stoic in her final moments, newly released documents reveal. She remained stoic to the end. The famous World War I spy known as "Mata Hari" did not reveal anything during her last prison interrogation before she was executed by a French firing squad, recently revealed top secret files from the British intelligence agency MI5, reports The Star. The former Dutch exotic dancer whose name was Gertruda Margaretha Zelle never made a full confession nor gave up the name of any accomplices...

Heathrow Airport has been forced to defend its security after a pair of students smuggled two large World War I artillery shells on to a plane and flew to the US. Baggage screeners made the discovery when the teenagers landed in Chicago, sparking a major incident. It is believed they picked up the 75mm munitions as souvenirs while on a school trip to a former artillery range in France. The find prompted the evacuation of O’Hare International Airport by the FBI before officials concluded there was no risk of the shells exploding. It is not clear how the students, aged...

On this date in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked the United States Congress to declare war on Germany, following the publication of the Zimmerman Telegram (in which Germany offered to finance Mexico's entry into the war on their side and for Mexico to attempt to reconquer Texas, New Mexico and Arizona) and Germany's resumption of submarine attacks on American ships. Congress would declare war on April 6th.

The American Humanist Association filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Maryland calling for the removal of Bladensburg’s 40-foot Memorial Peace Cross, which honors men from Prince George’s County who died during World War I. The association and three individual plaintiffs contend that the cross, which is on state property, violates the constitutional principle of separation of church and state. The cross was dedicated in 1925. ...One of the individual plaintiffs, Steven Lowe of Washington, contends that the cross "associates a Christian religious symbol with the state and gives the impression that the state supports and approves of...

World War I began 100 years ago this summer. It's a centennial that goes beyond mere remembrance; the consequences of that conflict are making headlines to this day. To underline that, All Things Considered wanted to turn history on its head and ask historians and listeners alike: What if World War I had never happened? (Submit your answer in the form below.) If that sounds like an unlikely exercise, compare it to an even more unlikely event — the one that occurred on June 28, 1914, in the city of Sarajevo. It was the spark that ignited a global conflagration,...