Lieutenant Ruth Banfield Lowderback was nervous on her first flight accompanying wounded and ill soldiers back to the mainland U.S. The plane barreled down the runway of Hawaii’s Hickam Airfield to embark on a twenty-hour flight to San Francisco. On February 17, 1945, twenty-seven-year-old Lowderback, newlywed and newly deployed, marked two milestones: her first service… Read more →
Tag: ww2
World War II Romance Takes Flight: With Every Letter by Sarah Sundin
A confession: I am a fairly new romance reader. I only picked up my first true romance novel about a year ago. However, I grew up hearing a true story that could be straight out of a historical romance. My grandparents met and had a shipboard romance just after World War II as they served… Read more →
The Case for an African Magneto: African Experiences of Torture and Oppression during World War II
The internet broke in August when Zack Stentz, the writer of X-Men: First Class, tweeted that he wanted Giancarlo Esposito to play a reimagined Magneto. Stentz proposed that Esposito’s Magneto could be a Tutsi man who survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide and became a different version of the classic character featured in the X-Men comics,… Read more →
Women in the French Resistance
In France, women have long played a vital role in the military. Like most modern militaries, in multiple conflicts the French army had “camp followers,” mostly women, but also men and children, who took care of the cooking, laundering, and other tasks needed to maintain a large standing army. During the French Revolution, some women… Read more →
The Power of Corporate Interests Over Home Baking
In 1840, the American press widely circulated illustrations of Queen Victoria’s wedding cake. It was a 300-pound, 14-inch-tall and 10-foot-wide plum cake, decorated with piped floral detailing and topped with a figure of Britannia blessing the couple while cupids sat around them. It was a sharp contrast to the simply iced, single-tier fruit cake that… Read more →