November Object: American POW in WWI
Series: From Our Collections
By Jeremy DibbellOur November Object of the Month is up: it's an October 1918 photograph of a group of American prisoners of war taken at the German prison camp Landshut. Atlantic Monthly correspondent (and fighter pilot) James Norman Hall, one of those prisoners, sent the photo along with a note to Atlantic editor Ellery Sedgwick.
See the photograph, and read background on Hall, Segwick and others here. And remember to check out our current exhibition: "Atlantic Harvest: Ellery Sedgwick and The Atlantic Monthly, 1909-1938."
permalink
| Published: Thursday, 12 November, 2009, 5:33 PM
Hive Home
Recent Posts
- This Week @MHS
- Founder to Founder
- "Great sights upon the water...": unexplained phenomena in early Boston
- This Week @MHS
- Images of the 1925 bombing of Damascus
- “Light, airy, and genteel”: Abigail Adams on French Women
- This Week @MHS
- George Hyland’s Diary, January 1919
- New and Improved: The Tufts Family Logbooks
- This Week @MHS
- Upcoming Education Events
- The First Publication of Phillis Wheatley
- Christmas 1918
- A lovely day for a cup of Tea!
- This Week @MHS
Beehive Series
- Around MHS
- Around the Neighborhood
- Blog Info
- Civil War
- Collection Profiles
- Collections News
- Education Programs
- Exhibitions News
- From Our Collections
- From the Reading Room
- From the Reference Librarian
- MHS in the News
- On Loan
- Readers Relate
- Reading the Proceedings
- Recent Events
- Research Published
- Today @MHS
Archives
For questions, comments, and suggestions,
email the beekeeper
subscribe
Comments
Nov 30, 2009, 6:35 pm
Peter
The pilots--most if not all are pilots--in the photograph are not all Americans, but rather a true cross section of the Allies (those that I can identify from their "wings"--flying badges--in a large-scale digital scan of the photograph). The character of WWI aviation history being what it is--experts "decipher" the color schemes of aircraft by examining shades of gray in black-and-white photographs--it is my hope that it may be possible to identify James Norman Hall's fellow prisoners by drawing upon the vast literature of this field.
Hall's personal papers are at Grinnell College where a former library assistant now is a student, and they also may shed light on this question.
I also refer to the units that Hall served in after he was commissioned in the United States Army as "pursuit" squadrons--an anachronism during the Great War when they still were titled "aero" squadrons, but there always is something to fix or improve.
Commenting has closed for this post. Thank you for participating.