Churno coming in march. Please join me in thanking the professor. Thank you, robert. Youre watching American History tv all weekend every weekend on cspan 3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. The National Archives in College Park Maryland houses hundreds of photos created during world war 1. Next we look at drawings. She has showcased the artists on the blog the unwritten record. When i first came to the archi archi archives, i had no idea what the archives was about. When came here as a volunteer, i was asked if i wanted to work on a conservation project for record group 120 which is the records of the combat units of the American Forces. Since i had no frame of reference, i said yesterday. That got me into looking at these records that first of all, i was astonished to understand i was handling records that go back to world war 1. That alone was very interesting and entertaining. 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 and they work down to the bri gad level and then to the regiment level. Then i got to something called field messages. Some of the men were Intelligence Officers that are probably no further from the german lines than i am to the next desk in this room. They were concealed and they were listening to the germans and much watching the germans a reporting back to the headquarters. I was hooked by that time. Then world war 1 became real for me and i was very interested in it. It was like a fever among those of us who were working on that group of records. We all became interested and we started reading books and buying books and one of the books that someone bought was about world war 1 arrow trtists. I had never heard of anything like that and neither had most of the people in the group. He brought the book in and we looked at it and we said this is really good. He found out that the photographs of these pieces of artwork were here at the archives. Thats really cool. We came up here and looked at them. But that was the end of it until we also found out the American Museum of history has a collection of these. They dont have the entire collection, but they have a nicesized collection of this artwork. So many of us went out to washington d. C. To the museum where the occur raters were very kind. The artwork was stunning. By the time we got back somebody was going to look at the photographs and i was going to write about it. Thats how we started out and it ended up that one of the people who was working very closely with me as many volunteers do had other things that he wanted to work on and kind of left in the middle of this project so then it was me, but thats okay. I was very interested in it and except for one little stumble carried on fairly well. So the stumble was i had actually so much material to work with for this one artist because of the way i went about it that it took me a long, long time to get through it. And 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 that you hate it, tell me anything. There was nothing. There was no response at all. At that point i said why am i doing this. You know, a few weeks later i said i committed to doing this. I am going to finish it. Then i found out that they were keeping statistics about how many people were viewing the blogs and 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 blackjack pershing and one of the things that he desired and desired as in instructed was artists to go over and to record the battles. He wanted this for two purposes. One was to record, make a recorded history 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 werent necessarily going into the war and it could also be used to entice young men to join the army. So with that being said, they went and looked for some artists and they actually had sort of a not a contest, perhaps, but they were looking around at artists who were magazine and picture book artists because they felt that would be the kind of artist most able to capture the battle scenes. And so they found these eight artists and with very little training they were sent off military training, that is, they were sent off to france armed mostly with their sketch pads and pencils and easeles. They didnt have anything in the way of mu nishs, but one of the things they had to abide by was the rule they had to send their art back to headquarters. At that point it was all photographed before it was ever shipped back to the United States and only after it was photographed did it actually leave france. The Army Signal Core is where the photographers were assigned and they took thousands of pictures from all kinds of activities and all kinds of different objects. There were pictures of ships. There were pictures of guns. Pictures of men in the trenches. Just all kinds of pictures. Balloons. If there was anything to do with the war, including even just storage spaces, they photographed it. So there were actually both artists and photographers that went on this. There is actually 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 a tripod and his camera attached to the tripod. As i said, most of these artists were had their background in magazine and artwork. So they ended up with Albert Duncan dunn Harding Smith and towns en townsend, those were the artists sent over and they were different human beings as you can imagine. One was a small slightly built man and his opposite would have been dunn because he was a big strapping man. And one of the things that he did that was slightly different from all the other artists was to spend a little bit of time in the trenches. Im not trying to tell you that he spent a month there, but he certainly went in for a few days and while the other artists certainly were familiar with the trenches and may have stepped foot in them, they didnt stay the period of time that mr. Dunn did. This is a piece of artwork of the levathian. It has an interesting history because it was a german ship that had been interred and turned in new york and was sitting there when the United States declared war. It was a huge cruise ship. So the United States decided that it would be a perfect vessel for transporting american troops to france. So thats what it was used for and so that was this one is by william or it was by bill he liked to be called bill. I have a picture or i have this artwork. Mines were used quite often with the idea that they could go under the enemy, dig under the enemy and plant these explosives and blow the enemy away. And some of these mine crators, i can ive been to france and have seen a mine crater, these of things are huge and they did an immense amount of destruction, but unfortunately from the allies point of view it probably didnt have the if ekt effect o germans that they thought because the germans were smart and they were very well in place. So what we have is a record of some of the immense destruction that was done in world war 1. So here we have another piece of artwork. I like this because its a completely different view point. Its more art for arts sake than for war. You can see hes sitting inside a ruined building. Its like looking into a cave and seeing at the far side, upper side of the cave theres this ray of light coming through. I just thought, you know, the message is that in the midst of all this ruin, there is still some light. When i was doing the articles, the blogs, i wanted to make sure that we got some artwork that had the enlisted men in it because they were the ones who actually fought and they were the ones when there wasnt any food, theyre the ones that didnt eat. When there wasnt water, they didnt get anything to drink. That happen quite often, perhaps more often than people are aware of. Theres a story about the 42nd division marching from their training grounds in france to the trenches and on the way the because it was in the middle of winter, it was in february, the kitchens couldnt keep up. So when they got to their bib wax sites there was no food. So its not atypical it happened quite a bit that the army was ahead of where the food was and it took quite 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. This shows the men lining up in the kitchen to get their food. This is a sketch that was done by morgan and i like this one very much because it is an american medical staff tending to german prisoners of war. I just like the fact that even when theres war and theres all this opportunity for hatred and there was a lot of that, that people are treated decently, at least sometimes. One of the objects i had in doing these blogs was to show the modernization of warfare. So world war 1 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 and the americans had none because it was too hard to transport. When we used tanks, it was mainly the ones built by the french. This pictured by townsend, you can see theres a tank being tended to by a couple of enlisted men. Theyre trying to put camouflage over it because they wanted to make sure it was hidden by the enemy who also had airplanes and balloons to observe what was going on and they wanted to make sure that 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. In that same vein, this is a sketch that was done by townsend of an airliplane and you have m here along the wing and tail trying to get the plane ready for an alert. Theres some things that i find either ironic or plain tragic in some of the artwork and what we have here, this is by dunn. This is a cemetery. In the cemetery theres a machine guns have been set up to mow the enemy down. To me thats rather tragic. When harvey dunn and indeed when the American Forces came to france, some of them landed in 1917 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 and because it was the army of ok occupation there were some done after the end of the war. So youll see there are pictures of the American Forces entering germany, but this one is by one of my favorite artists and this is by harvey dunn. When he first came over he drew this image of an enlisted man. This is the machine gunner. You might think this machine gunner looks a lot like superman because of his square jaw and his broad shoulders and his narrow waist. It was very ideaized, but harvey dunn was passionate and this is how he saw the war and men. This shows street fighting. You can see its a grizly 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 because the men of the 36th division shortly after the war was over were asked to write down their personal war experiences, which they did. Some of them it ran the gamut from you made me write this and i did, and im paraphrasing, to we came, we saw and we beat the germans, to things that were four and five pages long, very detailed descriptions of the battle. But when i put the blog together, there was a couple that i thought were very indicative of the dwrgrizlyness war. Id like to read two of them to you now. This first one was written by an unknown soldier in company l of the 141st infantry. He says after a few hours hiking, i was soon on the battlefield. The first sight i saw was a german skull. A stick was stuck in the ground and his head was hung over the top of it. A cigarette was in his mouth and a steel helmet was on the side. It was a stick. Thats a rather sterling introduction to war. The second one was written by a cook of the company b. He wrote, i met a constant stream of german prisoners going to the rear. One mp who i was walking with had three german officers as prisoners, one captain and two lieutenants. We had not gone far until a rolling kitchen came along and all we could find of those german officers was one boot full of leg and one head. He said im damn glad it will save me a walk and the mp went back to the front. After the americans saw battle, particularly sammy, they started capturing german prisoners. I thought this picture drawn by duncan was interesting and arresting in some ways because a german prisoner is being escorted by an american soldier through a town in france and 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 who you might think would have a different reaction to having the enemy right in their hometown seem to be indifferent themselves. So i thought it was an interesting perspective on the whole prisoner of war thing. I have to admit this is my favorite piece of artwork from world war 1. To me, this is almost like art for arts sake. You, as the viewer, are looking through an arch of a ruin town. What youre seeing is a very old or at least old looking french lady dressed in something that looks like it came out of a Victorian Era bent overlooking almost as if shes shuffling forward. Shes being passed by this young vigorous straight standing man who is striding forward. Its very much a composition of opposites. You can look at this and say its the result of four years of war against the confidence and the optimism of the american soldiers. You can see maybe this is even like the old world meets the new world because world war 1 marked a change in american status in the world as a power. I wanted to end where i started, which was with the same artist. In this this is a beautiful composition. It is also, i think, symbolic of war. What you see is freshly dug earth with a very simple wooden cross and a lone american soldier mourning the loss of a comrade in arms. What i found out after i started working here a while is there were records from world war ii and i had thought i might find my fathers unit because he was in the army afrsz air force. There are a lot of records about the army air force. It turns out the way the air force kept records is every Single Mission that was flown was recorded. There were things about the actual weather, the amount of ammunition that were spent, the bombs that were dropped, anything that happened on the plane and also, most important to me, all the names of the crew that flew. And the first time that i saw my fathers name with his crew, i almost cried. It was that moving. In fact, im about to cry now. It was that moving to me. And he flew on a lot of missions and i have made sure i made copies of all of those. But it took me i would not have none that if i hadnt come here as a volunteer and started working on world war 1 and started thinking there might be some records. I had no expectation of finding my fathers name. It was a big emotional thing for me. We had talked earlier about the availability of photographs and there certainly are thousands of them here at the archives. There are hundreds of photographs of the artwork that the artists did. The reason why the artwork is important is because a photograph photographs exactly what is there. There is no perspective on it. There is no emotion. When you have artwork, you get the hes bringing with him his experiences. Hes seeing more than just that camera would see. He brings all that. Its very important to understand that and to appreciate what is in the artwork itself. To see more world war 1 combat art and to learn about the artists, you can visit the blog the unwritten record. Youre watching American History tv all weekend every weekend on cspan 3. To join the conversation, like us on facebook at cspan history. Continuing our look at richmond, this is the citys famed monument avenue with statutes honoring war heros including robert e. Lee, jackson and davis. Tennis star arthur ash was added to the collection. Conversations about monument avenue and which statutes should be added, changed or removed continue today. Up next our visit to richmond continues as we travel to the Virginia Historical associate to learn about the states history. Welcome to the Virginia Historical society. We are standing at the entrance to the story of virginia, which is our longterm exhibition that covers all of virginia history from prehistory to the present day. This is an exhibit thats meant to show visitors how virginia plays into the broader narrative