College park, maryland, houses hundreds of photos of artwork created during world war i. Next on american artifacts, we look at drawings by combat artists with volunteer jim hargis. She has showcased the art and the artists on the blog, the unwritten record. When i first came to the archives, i had no idea what the archives was about. When i came here as a volunteer, i was asked if i wanted to work in a conservation project. It was for the records of the combat units of the American Expeditionary forces. Since i had no frame of reference, i said yes. Me into looking at the records that i was astonished to understand i was handling records that go back to world war i. That alone was very interesting and entertaining. But as we went along, one of the things that i found out in looking through the records was that the records start at the division level, they work down to the brigade level, and then to the regiment level. At the regiment level, we were going through the files that we and we came across called field messages. As i was looking at these, i realized that these field messages were being written by men who were out in the field. Some of them were Intelligence Officers who were probably no further from the german lines than i am to the next desk in this room. They were concealed and listening to the germans and watching the germans and reporting all of this back to to the regimental headquarters. I was hooked by that time. Then world war i became real for me and i was very interested in it. It was like a fever for us working on those records. We all became interested and started reading books and buying books. One of the books that someone bought was about world war i artists. Well, i have never heard of anything like that and neither had most of the people in that group. He brought the book in and we looked at it. We said this is really good. He found out that the photographs of these pieces of artwork were here at the archives. I said man, that is really cool. We came up here and we looked at them. That was the end of it until we also found out that the Smithsonian American Museum of history has a collection of these. They do not have the entire collection, but they have a nice sized collection of this artwork. Toy of us went out washington, d. C. , where the curators were very kind and knowledgeable. They showed us many pieces of this original artwork which was just stunning. But the time we got back, someone would look at the photographs and i was going to write about it. That is how we started out. It ended up that one of the people working closely with me had other things he wanted to work on. He kind of left in the middle of the project. Then it was me, but that is ok. I was very interested in it. Except for one little stumble, carried on fairly well. The stumble was i had so much material to work with for this one artist that it took me a long time to get through it. By the time i finished and the article was posted i was , breathlessly waiting for responses from the public saying yes, no, tell me that you like it. Tell me anything. There was nothing. There was no response at all. At that point, i said why am i , doing this . A few weeks later, i said i committed to doing this. I am going to finish it. Then i found out they were keeping statistics about how many people were viewing the blog. I was astonished to find out how many people actually read that blog. When the United States declared war on germany, they had to organize the entire army and it came under general jack black pershing. One of the things he desired, instructed, was artists to go over and record the battles. And he wanted this for two purposes. One was to record history and through artwork but the other reason was for a little bit of propaganda. He wanted to be able to send artwork back to the United States that would ensure that the American Public was in favor of the war because they were not necessarily going into the war. It can also be used to entice young men to join the army. Said, they went and looked for artists. Contest,ally had not a but they were looking around at artists who were magazine and picture book artists. They felt that would be the kind of artist most able to capture the battle scenes. Eightey found these artists. Military little training, they were sent off to france. Armed mostly with their sketch pads and pencils and easels. They did not have anything in the way of munitions. But one of the things they had to abide by was the rule they had to send their artwork back to headquarters, the American Expeditionary headquarters. At that point, it was photographed before it was shipped back to the United States. Only after it was photographed did it leave france. The photographers took thousands of pictures. They were from all kinds of activities and all kind of different objects. There were pictures of ships, there were pictures of guns, pictures of men in the trenches. Just all kinds of pictures. If there was anything to do with the war, including just storage spaces, they photographed it. They were both artists and photographers that went on this. There is a very interesting photograph of a photographer standing in a trench with water up to his knees. Which is fairly typical of the trenches, with his tripod and his camera attached. As i said most of these artists , had their background in magazine artwork. They ended up with the artists that were the artists sent over. They were as different human beings as you can imagine. One was a small, slightly built man. His opposite would have been dunn, harvey dunn, he was a big strapping man. One of the things he did that was slightly different from all of the artists was to spend a little bit of time and all the trenches. I am not trained to tell you he spent a month there, but he certainly went in for a few days. While the other artists were andliar with the trenches may have set foot in them, they did not stay the time mr. Dunn did. This is a piece of artwork in of the leviathan. The leviathan has a interesting to it because it was actually a german ship that had been interned in new york and was actually sitting at hoboken when the United States declared war. Well, it was a huge cruiseship. The United States decided it would be a perfect vessel for transporting american troops to france. So that is what it was used for. Bill. Ne is by he liked to be called bill. I have a picture. This picture, this artwork, is of a mine crater. Minds were used quite often with the idea that they could go under the enemy and plant these explosives and blow the enemy away. I have been to france and seen at least one of these craters. , almost 100 years later, these things are huge. They did an immense amount of destruction. Unfortunately, for the allies, it probably didnt have the effect on the germans that they thought because the germans were very smart. They were very well in place. What we have is a record of the immense destruction that was done in world war i. Here we have another piece of artwork by pejoto. I like his because it is a completely different viewpoint. I would call it more art for arts sake. An actually recording the war. You can see that he is inside a ruined building. It is like looking into a cave. You can see at the far side of the cave there is this ray of , light coming through. In the midst of all this ruling, ruin, there is still some light. I wanted to make sure we had some artwork they had the enlisted men in it because they were the ones that actually fought. When there was not any food, they were the ones that did not eat. Whenever was not water, they did not getting get anything to drink. That happened quite often. There is a story about the 42nd division marching from their training grounds in france to the trenches. On the way, because it was in the middle of winter, it was in february, the kitchens could not keep up. When they got to their sites, there was no food. It is not atypical. It happened quite a bit that the army was ahead of where the food was. It took a while for the food to get to them. I wanted to make sure we had some artwork that concentrated on what was going on with the enlisted men. And this shows the men lining up at the kitchen to get their food. This is a sketch done by morgan. I like this one very much because it is american medical staff tending the german prisoners of war. I just like the fact that even when there is war, there is all this opportunity for hatred, and a was a lot of that, that people are treated decently. At least sometimes. One of the objects i had in doing this blog was showing the modernization of warfare. World war i saw the introduction of airplanes as a means of bombing people and observation. But it was also the introduction of tanks thanks to the british. The british and the french had tanks. The americans had none because it was too far to transport. We used mainly the that were ones built by the french. In this picture, you can see there is a tank being attended to by a couple of enlisted men. What they are trying to do is put camouflage over it because of course they wanted to make sure it was hidden by the enemy who also had airplanes and balloons to observe what was going on. They wanted to make sure there was a very big investment in these tanks. And they were trying to protect their investment as well as have it ready for the next offense. This is a sketch that was done by townsend of an airplane. You have men here along the wing and the tail trying to get the plane ready for an alert. There are some things i find either ironic or just plain tragic in some of the artwork. What we have here, this is by dunn. This is a cemetery. In the cemetery, machine guns have been set up to mow the enemy down. It seems to me that is rather tragic. When harvey dunn and the American Forces came to france, some of them landed in late 1917. But most of the army became active in france in 1918. So a lot of these pictures were , drawn during the time from about april through the end of the war. Because it was the army of occupation, there were some that were done after the end of the world. You can see that there are some pictures of the American Forces entering germany. But this one is by one of my favorite artists. This was by harvey dunn. When he came over, he drew this image of an enlisted man. This is a machinegunner. This machinenk gunner looks a lot like superman because of his square jaw and broad shoulders and narrow waist. It was very idealized. But harvey dunn himself was very howonate, and this is he saw the war and this is how he saw the men. This is another sketch by harvey dunn showing street fighting. It is grizzly and certainly has a very favorable image of the americans as fighters. One of the things that i did when i was writing the blog about harvey dunn was to go back to the textual records. The men of the 36th division were asked to write down their personal war experiences. It went from, you made me do this, so i did. We came, we saw, we beat the germans. To things that were four or five pages long, very detailed descriptions of the battle. When i put the blog together, there were a couple i thought were very indicative of the ness of war. I would like to read two of them now. This first one was written by an unknown soldier in company l of the 141st infantry. He said after a few hours hiking, i was soon on the battlefield. The first site i saw was a german skull. A stick stuck in the ground and a head on top of it. A camel cigarette was in his mouth and his old steel helmet was lying by the side of the sticks. Which is a rather startling introduction to war. The second one was written by william laffe. He was a cook with company b of the machine gun battalion. He said i met a constant stream of german soldiers. One m. P. I was walking with her three german officers as prisoners. We had not gone far until a rolling kitchen came along and i would find of the german officers was one bootfull of leg. And a head. The m. P. Said im glad because it will save me a walk and then he went back to the front. After the americans saw battle, paticularly sammy l, they started capturing german prisoners. I thought this picture drawn by duncan was interesting in some ways because this is german prisoners being escorted by an american soldier through a town in france. It doesnt seem as if anybody really cares. The germans dont seem to be particularly anxious to be anywhere except where they are. The american soldier escorting them doesnt seem to be particularly intense about it. The french people you might think would have a different reaction to having the enemy in their hometown seem to be indifferent themselves. I thought it was an interesting perspective on the prisoner of war thing. I have to admit that this is my favorite piece of artwork from world war i. This is by peixotto. This is almost like art for arts sake. You as the viewer are looking through an arch of a ruined town. What you are seeing is an old looking french lady dressed in something that looked like it came out of Victorian Era kind of bent over, looking almost as if she is shuffling forward. And she is being passed by this young, vigorous, straight standing man who is striding forward, so it is very much a composition of opposites. You could look at this and say it is the result of four years against the confidence and optimism of the american soldiers. If you want to go even further, you could say maybe this is like the old world meets the new world because world war i marked a change in the american status in the world as a power. I wanted to end where i started which is with the same artist. Which is bill aylward. This is a beautiful composition. It is also i think emblematic of war. What you see is freshly dug earth with a very simple wooden and an american soldier mourning the loss of a comrade in arms. What i found out after i started working here for a while was that there were records from world war ii. I thought i might find my fathers unit. Because he was in the army air force. There are a lot of records about the army air force. It turns out that the way the air force kept records was that every Single Mission that was flown was recorded. The weather, the amount of munitions spent, the bombs that were dropped. Anything that happened on the planes. Also, most important to me, all the names of the crew that flew. The first time i saw my fathers crew, i almost cried. It was that moving to me. Im about to cry now. It was that moving to me. He flew on a lot of missions. I have made sure that i made copies of all of those. I would not have known that if i had not come here as a volunteer and started working on world war i and started thinking there might be some records. And i have no expectation of finding my fathers name. It was a big, emotional thing for me. Weve talked earlier about the availability of photographs. There are thousands here at the archives. There are hundreds of photographs of the artwork that the artists did. The reasons why the artwork is important is because they progress exactly what is there. There is no perspective on it. There is no emotion. When you have artwork, you get the man. He is bringing with him his experiences. He is seeing more than just the camera would see. He brings all of that. It is very important to understand that and appreciate what is in the artwork itself. To see more world war i combat art and to learn more about the artists, you can visit the archives blog, the amendment record the unwritten record. A panelist of historians compare the first 100 days of previous president s and discuss es priorities for the new trump administration. Some of the things they talk about include international policy, civil rights, and immigration. This took place at the American Historical Association annual meeting in denver. It is just over an hour and a half. When we conceived of this plenary about a year or so ago, we thought of it as an opportunity for historians to share their expertise with the itemsurgent Public Policy new pren