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~ The FReeper Canteen Remembers ~ ~ Veterans Day 2021 ~ Veterans Day gives Americans the opportunity to celebrate the bravery and sacrifice of all U.S. veterans. However, most Americans confuse this holiday with Memorial Day, reports the Department of Veterans Affairs. What's more, some Americans don't know why we commemorate our Veterans on Nov.11. It's imperative that all Americans know the history of Veterans Day so that we can honor our former service members properly. Memorial Day honors service members who died in service to their country or as a result of injuries incurred during battle. Deceased veterans...

Many Americans have no idea why we celebrate Veterans Day on November 11. Those who know that the holiday began as Armistice Day typically think of it as a day of victory and peace. However, for those on the ground in Europe the last twenty-four hours before the cessation of hostilities on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, that day was nothing less than hell on earth.

FOUR people have been injured after a grenade was reportedly hurled at a Remembrance Day ceremony for Brit and French expats in Saudi Arabia. France's foreign ministry confirmed a number of people were wounded in the blast at a non-Muslim cemetery in the Saudi city of Jeddah. George Malbrunot, who works for French newspaper Le Figaro, reported a "grenade was thrown" at the ceremony taking place on Armistice Day. Unverified pictures allegedly from the scene show splatters of blood on the ground and at least one person receiving medical care. The veteran reporter, who was once held hostage in Iraq,...

Veterans Day, celebrated each year on November 11th, was first celebrated on this same date in 1919, under the name of Armistice Day. The holiday was named in remembrance of the temporary ceasefire that brought about the unofficial end to World War I when, the year before, the Allied forces entered into an armistice with the Germans, stopping live battle on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. A year later, and nearly five months after the official end of the First World War (which occurred on June 28, 1918, with the Treaty...

It's the Memorial Day image that made Americans online everywhere put their hands to their hearts. A photo that amateur photographer Frank Glick snapped in 2011 of a bald eagle resting on a veteran's gravestone suddenly went viral after the Department of Veterans tweeted it earlier this week. And it's easy to see why. The shot depicts a bald eagle, America's iconic symbol of freedom, perched atop a gravestone, pensively looking out over the expanse. According to an interview with Fox News, Glick snapped the image early one morning at the Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minnesota before attending a...

The first world war, George Kennan wrote decades after it ended, was the ur‑catastrophe of the 20th century. The first conflict among industrialized global powers killed 10 million soldiers and mutilated over 21 million more. Both the war and the peace that followed have marked our world in indelible ways. Especially Europe. The deaths of more than 110,000 Americans in uniform, half to the Spanish flu, were equivalent to just one-quarter of the death toll in the French army alone during the first four months of the war. Europe suffered a bloodbath such as the world had never seen. Two...

The standard view of World War I is that it is a testament to the futility of war. Yet maybe the better way to think of the war, which lasted from 1914 to 1918—including American participation in 1917-1918—is that if war comes, it’s better to win than to lose. [...] Most of the chronicling of that war is heavy on mournfulness, along with the implication that war solves nothing. Hence we see headlines such as “The Tragic Futility of World War I” and “The Most Unnecessary War in History.” Still, we are left to wonder: If the war was “futile”...

ARLINGTON, Va. - At 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Nov. 11, 1918 ("the eleventh hour of the eleventh month"), an Armistice took place between the Allied and Central powers across all battle zones. It marked the beginning of the steps that would bring the First World War to an end. The efforts of the National Guard were pivotal to Allied success in obtaining this goal of ending the bloody and futile war. The Guard engaged in combat for the first time ever with the official name of "National Guard." In the War, forces fought alongside them from both the...

This is no ordinary Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth and much of Europe, and Veterans Day in the United States. Today we mark the one hundredth anniversary of the Armistice that brought to an end the most terrible war in history. Exactly a century ago - on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month - the guns fell silent on Europe's battlefields. The belligerents had agreed the terms of the peace at 5am that November morning, and the news was relayed to the commanders in the field shortly thereafter that hostilities would cease at eleven o'clock....

Alexander Solzhenitsyn had once asked why, in 1914, a Europe "bursting with health and abundance" had "fallen into a rage of self-mutilation"; and the Russian writer offered the same explanation as he did for all the disasters of the early 20th century: man had "forgotten God". Anyone will agree that there was a decline in the importance of religion during and after the first world war. Theocratically-based regimes, notably the Russian and Ottoman empires, were replaced by secular ones. In western Europe, Protestant and Catholic clergy struggled to explain the seemingly senseless horrors of the war to their flock. It...

Heads of states and governments attend ceremonies to mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice which brought the First World War to a close. Watch live Sunday, Nov. 11 at 4am ET.

The eleventh, day of the eleventh month is either today or tomorrow depending on where you live.

As they awaken on the morning of November 11 1918, along the 400-mile Western Front from Switzerland in the south to the Belgian coast in the north, nearly 10 million men on both sides know from developments over recent days that an armistice is imminent. They are praying for a swift end to the war. What they are not aware of yet is that at 5.20am in the Compiegne Forest just north of Paris, on the private train of Marshal Foch, commander-in-chief of the Allied armies, the Armistice agreement was signed after three days of negotiation. The war is entering...

More than 60 heads of state and government are converging on France for the commemorations that will crescendo Sunday with ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, exactly a century after the armistice.

The Great War of 1914-1918 was the defining event of our time: a lost generation of millions dead or maimed; mournful widows and orphans; empires toppled and nations shattered; Western civilization damaged; vast treasures sacrificed. And in war's aftermath, democracies stillborn and totalitarianism and vengeance enthroned. How did it happen? Keegan, despite his vast expertise, confesses that even when one knows what happened, it is difficult to explain why. "The First World War is a mystery. Its origins are mysterious. So is its course. Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent...

An atheist group claims the Maryland 'Peace Cross' is unconstitutionalThe Supreme Court has announced that it will hear oral arguments this term to consider if a 40-foot cross in Maryland endorses religion or is simply a secular memorial. The cross in question sits at a busy intersection in the Washington suburb of Bladensburg, Maryland, and memorializes soldiers who died in World War I. Last year, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals based in Richmond, Virginia, ruled 2-1 that the 93-year-old monument is unconstitutional and must be removed or destroyed. “(It) has the primary effect of endorsing religion and excessively...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I on French soil, and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will be in London at a ceremony in Westminster Abby with Queen Elizabeth II. But while the leaders visit the capitals of Germany's wartime enemies, at home there are no national commemorations planned for the centenary of the Nov. 11 armistice that brought an end to the four-year war that killed more than 2 million of its troops and left 4 million wounded. Next week, German parliament is holding a combined commemoration of the 100th anniversary...

Did the horrors of the Great War cause Canadian soldiers to lose their faith? Or is it true that there were no atheists in the trenches? The war has generally been seen as a powerfully disillusioning experience. Books such as Paul Fussell’s widely influential The Great War and Modern Memory portray the war as the origins of modern skepticism and cynicism. The idea of a “lost generation” of disillusioned Anglo-American vets is a widely accepted one. The situation in Canada, however, is a little more ambiguous. In his study of the war’s impact on Canadian culture, Death So Noble, Jonathan...

Donald Trump is to hold meetings with Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Paris as world leaders arrive in western Europe for ceremonies to mark 100 years since the end of the first world war. Emmanuel Macron, the French president and host for the armistice ceremonies in Paris on 11 November, hopes to use the emotion of the occasion to warn that a nationalist resurgence led by authoritarian leaders – an outcome of the flawed ending of the first world war – will threaten liberal democracies and the institutions of multilateralism, the chief outcome of the second world war....