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America’s first great victory in the war was a costly one. The Marines alone took more casualties in those three weeks than they had in the entirety of their existence. Private Lee was shot through the wrist on June 12; Captain Williams was killed that same day. There are 2,288 men buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, just behind the woods. Almost four times as many are buried in the much smaller German cemetery nearby.

Belleau Wood looks today much as it did in 1918, and presents visitors to this part of the country with their best opportunity to get a sense of what it was like during the war. It is filled with trenches, shell holes and fox holes, so many that no one ever bothered to put up signs pointing them out. The cemetery staff has in recent years blazed a walking trail through the forest and has printed a self-guided tour. It starts at a visitors’ area with a statue and lots of retired big guns, then moves into the woods. Trenches meander right alongside the path; it’s easy to envision it all — the shooting, the shelling, the hunkering and praying and dying.

At that moment a large wave overturned the overloaded boat, and those who could not swim had little chance. Eighteen died, some before the rescuers took away the women, and some after.This was back in November 1997, but it is a scenario that has been repeated again and again in the intervening years.

Thousands of people have died on the journey to Mayotte from the other Comoros Islands - Anjouan, Moheli and Grande Comore - since Mayotte voted to remain part of France in 1975, and the other islands voted for independence. It's a carbon copy of the situation in the Mediterranean, where people make the crossing from North Africa or Turkey, in search of a better life - except that few in the West have paid the slightest attention to this crisis in the waters between Mozambique and Madagascar."We have the mournful reputation of having the largest marine cemetery," the Governor of Anjouan, Anissi Chamsidine, said in May. "More than 50,000 Comorians have perished amid a deafening silence from the international community and France…

The problem became acute in 1995, when the French government, under prime minister Edouard Balladur, put an end to visa-free travel.

islanders from the villages often do not have the papers needed for a visa application, so nearly everyone travelling to Mayotte from other Comoros islands goes illegally, by fishing boat, or kwassa-kwassa.The kwassa-kwassa are not intrinsically dangerous - they are a normal form of transport between the other Comoros islands and considered by the Comorians to be quite safe.But the migrants take round-about routes, nearly always travelling at night to dodge patrol boats - and all-too-often the smugglers overload the boats, just as they do in the Mediterranean.

The scale of the traffic is illustrated by the numbers picked up by the French authorities in Mayotte and sent home - about 20,000 in 2014 - and by the flood of applications made each year for residence permits - about 100,000, including renewals (of which only about 18,000 are approved).

Biden said during his speech that he carries a card with him every day, and on it, the number of American service members killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When he spoke Sunday, Biden talked about his son, Beau, who served in the Delaware Army National Guard. His unit was activated and he deployed to Iraq in October 2008. Beau Biden died exactly six years ago Sunday of brain cancer.

"A lot of time passes, but you all know, better than I do or as well as I do, that the moment that we celebrate it is the toughest day of the year. We're honored, but it's a tough day that brings back everything," President Biden said. "

"We may have many obligations to the nation, but we only have one truly sacred obligation and that's to equip those that we send into harm's way with all they need and care for them and their families when they return home, and when they don't," Biden said.

Memorial Day officially became a federal holiday in 1971, but its roots go back to the Civil War.

There are currently 155 national cemeteries in 42 states and Puerto Rico operated and maintained by the Department of Veterans Affairs' National Cemetery Administration. This doesn't include state-run veterans cemeteries. The men and women buried at these sacred sites are the backbone of the United States, Biden said.

“I’m happy that a World War I veteran is able to have his grave marked after all these years,” he said

Peltz served in the Korean War, and takes a lot of pleasure in getting Brenay the recognition he deserves. There are more than 450 veterans buried in the cemetery, including others who served in World War I.

World War I could be said to have begun in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a young nationalist seeking a greater Serbia.

It also featured the initial step of the United States as a global power. President Woodrow Wilson ultimately failed in his ambitions for a new

Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and the growing strength of Germany and Russia

For France the war, however bloody, was a necessary response to invasion.

while World War II was an embarrassing collapse, with significant collaboration. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

In fact, the beginning of the war was mobile and extremely bloody, as were the last few months, when the big offensives of 1918 broke the German Army.

he memory of July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme — when 20,000 British soldiers died, 40,000 were wounded and 60 percent of officers were killed

“The supreme irony of 1914 is how many of the rulers of Europe grossly overestimated military power and grossly underestimated economic power,”

The end of the Cold War was in a sense a return to the end of World War I, restoring sovereignty to the countries of Eastern Europe, one reason they

Some question whether the lessons of 1914 or of 1939 are more valid today. Do we heed only the lessons of 1939,

Others point to the dangers of declining powers faced with rising ones, considering both China and the Middle East,

Even the Balfour Declaration, which threw British support behind the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, was signed during the war, in November 1917.

If Tyne Cot is the largest military cemetery for the Commonwealth, this is the smallest American military cemetery.

“I knew, wow, I have slaves in my family, and I would like to know who they are,” he said. “It was an amazing pastime for me. It kept my mind off the fact that I knew that Monday morning I would have to go back to school and get bullied again.”

Dennis’s great-uncle, John Sherman Merritt, said it had been very difficult to get information from his elders, especially the great-grandmother who had been born before Emancipation and grew up during Reconstruction.

Through his searches he came across the work of a fifth cousin, Teresa Vega, a generation older, who was already engaged in a rigorous study of their ancestors from her apartment in Upper Manhattan.

His father, Dennis Sr., knew that there were family mysteries to be unraveled, though he had not tried to unlock them himself. Many of his relatives“don’t look like they’re of African descent,” he said. “Just visualizing our family, you can see that there’s a relation to different ethnic groups.”

Hangroot was a community once vibrant, but largely lost to history; its Black and Indigenous residents were mostly gone by 1910 — “gentrified out,” said Ms. Vega, by the twofold pressure of white immigrants and the arrival nearby of the Rockefellers. When a relative gave Dennis a photograph from around 1899 showing his great-great-grandfather as a boy in Hangroot, it put a face on an ancestor and a community Dennis knew only from documents.

Dennis learned about the great-great-grandfather in the photograph, how he worked himself to death at 31, and about his mother, born in 1871 in Virginia, the daughter of enslaved parents, who wrote poems that were published in newspapers.

Against his difficulties in school, his ancestors became role models. “Because grandpa John died of exhaustion, if I’m not dying from working hard, then why wouldn’t I continue to work hard?” Dennis said. “If I know that one of my ancestors couldn’t read and write for a few years because of the circumstances they were born into, but taught themselves how to do it, why wouldn’t I go online and look up a word that I didn’t know? So I’m learning from these stories. I’m not just finding these things out. They’re empowering me.”

Further searches revealed relatives of Mohawk descent.

Finally, an archivist at the Rye Historical Society found a bill of sale that Dennis realized referred to his sixth great-grandmother, Margaret Lyon, known as Peg, dated July 7, 1790. For the sum of “Fifty Pounds of New York Money,” she became the legal property of Nathan Merritt Jr., after whose family the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut is named.

Through DNA testing on numerous branches of the family, Mr. Richmond and his cousin Ms. Vega said they were able to determine that Peg bore at least one child — Mr. Richmond’s fifth great-grandfather, who was born into slavery — with a member of the white Merritt family that enslaved her.

Ms. Vega took the genealogy back a generation further. Peg Lyon, she found, was herself fathered by a man from the family that sold her to the Merritts, the Lyons, a comparably prominent family whose name is given to a park in nearby Port Chester, N.Y. Again, DNA testing confirmed her research.

She followed a family trail to Christine Varner, a Lyon descendant still living in Connecticut. Ms. Varner, who is white, said she always believed she might have relatives of African descent. Then Ms. Vega called.

In her childhood, her mother had taken her to the old African-American and Native American cemetery to place flowers on the graves. Now she understood why.

In the meantime, he said, his genealogy had given him a view of Black history far different from the one he’d learned in school — one that included Northern families like the Lyons and Merritts, Black and white, living in the same community for generations. During the pandemic, he wrote and self-published a book that included his adventures in genealogy, “He Spoke at My School.”

“To know that I have Indigenous DNA, on my dad’s side, just makes for a true American story,” he said. “You had slave owners who had slaves, and who had children with the people that they enslaved. You have people who came to this country from Europe and who had children with Indigenous people. And Indigenous people who had children with stolen Africans.

“And then you speed up hundreds of years,” he said, “and you have Dennis.”

She told me that she’d attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans event once but wouldn’t again. “These folks can’t let things go. I mean, it’s not like they want people enslaved again, but they can’t get over the fact that history is history.”

I thought about friends of mine who have spent years fighting to have Confederate monuments removed. Many of them are teachers committed to showing their students that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Others are parents who don’t want their kids to grow up in a world where enslavers loom on pedestals. And many are veterans of the civil-rights movement who laid their bodies on the line, fighting against what these statues represented. None of them, I thought as I looked at the smile on Gramling’s face, is a terrorist.

Gramling then turned his attention to the present-day controversy about Confederate monuments—to the people who are “trying to take away our symbols.” In 2019, according to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were nearly 2,000 Confederate monuments, place names, and other symbols in public spaces across the country. A follow-up report after last summer’s racial-justice protests found that more than 160 of those symbols had been removed or renamed in 2020.

Gramling said that this was the work of “the American ISIS.” He looked delighted as the crowd murmured its affirmation. “They are nothing better than ISIS in the Middle East. They are trying to destroy history they don’t like.”

Founded in 1896, the Sons of Confederate Veterans describes itself as an organization of about 30,000 that aims to preserve “the history and legacy of these heroes, so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause.” It is the oldest hereditary organization for men who are descendants of Confederate soldiers. I was wary of going to the celebration alone, so I asked my friend William, who is white, to come with me.

That myth tried to rewrite U.S. history, and my visit to Blandford showed how, in so many ways, it had succeeded.

It was then, in the late 1800s, that the myth of the Lost Cause began to take hold. The myth was an attempt to recast the Confederacy as something predicated on family and heritage rather than what it was: a traitorous effort to extend the bondage of millions of Black people. The myth asserts that the Civil War was fought by honorable men protecting their communities, and not about slavery at all.

The early 1900s saw a boom in Confederate-monument building. The monuments were meant to reinforce white supremacy in an era when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded. They were also intended to teach new generations of white southerners that the cause their ancestors had fought for was just.

“I think everybody should learn the truth,” Jeff said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.“What is that truth?” I asked.

The Louisville Daily Courier, for example, warned nonslaveholding white southerners about the slippery slope of abolition: “Do they wish to send their children to schools in which the negro children of the vicinity are taught? Do they wish to give the negro the right to appear in the witness box to testify against them?” The paper threatened that Black men would sleep with white women and “amalgamate together the two races in violation of God’s will.”

“Everybody always hears the same things: ‘It’s all about slavery.’ And it wasn’t,” he said. “It was about the fact that each state had the right to govern itself.”He pointed to a tombstone about 20 yards away, telling me it belonged to a “Black gentleman” named Richard Poplar. Jeff said Poplar was a Confederate officer who was captured by the Union and told he would be freed if he admitted that he’d been forced to fight for the South. But he refused.

But the reality is that Black men couldn’t serve in the Confederate Army. And an 1886 obituary suggests that Poplar was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.

Some people say that up to 100,000 Black soldiers fought for the Confederate Army, in racially integrated regiments. No evidence supports these claims, as the historian Kevin M. Levin has pointed out, but appropriating the stories of men like Poplar is a way to protect the Confederacy’s legacy. If Black soldiers fought for the South, how could the war have been about slavery? How could it be considered racist now to fly the Dixie flag?

I asked Jeff whether he thought slavery had played a role in the start of the Civil War. “Oh, just a very small part. I mean, we can’t deny it was there. We know slave blocks existed.” But only a small number of plantations even had slaves, he said.It was a remarkable contortion of history, reflecting a century of Lost Cause propaganda.

Two children ran behind me, chasing a ball. Jeff smiled. He told me that he doesn’t call it the “Civil War,” because that distorts the truth. “We call it the ‘War Between the States’ or ‘of Northern Aggression’ against us,” he said. “Southern people don’t call it the Civil War, because they know it was an invasion … If you stayed up north, ain’t nothing would’ve happened.”

I asked him what he believed the cause of the Civil War had been. “How do I put this gently?” he said. “People are not as educated as they should be.” They’re taught that “these men were fighting to keep slavery legal, and if that’s what you grow up believing, you’re looking at people like me wearing this uniform: ‘Oh, he’s a racist.’ ” He said he’d done a lot of research and decided the war was much more complicated.

I thought that scenario was unlikely; cities have spent millions of dollars on police protection for white nationalists and neo-Nazis, people far more extreme than the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I found it a little ironic that these monuments had been erected in part to instill fear in Black communities, and now Jason was the one who felt scared.

The typical Confederate soldier hadn’t been fighting for slavery, he argued. “The average age was 17 to 22 for a Civil War soldier. Many of them had never even seen a Black man. The rich were the ones who had slaves. They didn’t have to fight. They were draft-exempt. So these men are going to be out here and they’re going to be laying down their lives and fighting and going through the hell of camp life—the lice, the rats, and everything else—just so this rich dude in Richmond, Virginia, or Atlanta, Georgia, or Memphis, Tennessee, can have some slaves? That doesn’t make sense … No man would do that.”

But the historian Joseph T. Glatthaar has challenged that argument. He analyzed the makeup of the unit that would become Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and pointed out that “the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery.” Almost half either owned enslaved people or lived with a head of household who did, and many more worked for slaveholders, rented land from them, or had business relationships with them.

Many white southerners who did not own enslaved people were deeply committed to preserving the institution. The historian James Oliver Horton wrote about how the press inundated white southerners with warnings that, without slavery, they would be forced to live, work, and inevitably procreate with their free Black neighbors.

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I like it”—I kept coming back to Gramling’s words. That comment was revealing. Many places in the South claim to be the originator of Memorial Day, and the story is at least as much a matter of interpretation as of fact. According to the historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day ceremony was held in Charleston, South Carolina, in May 1865, when Black workmen, most of them formerly enslaved, buried and commemorated fallen Union soldiers.

The proposition of equality with Black people was one that millions of southern white people were unwilling to accept. The existence of slavery meant that, no matter your socioeconomic status, there were always millions of people beneath you. As the historian Charles Dew put it, “You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”

Once one of the most successful sugarcane enterprises in all of Louisiana, the Whitney is surrounded by a constellation of former plantations that host lavish events—bridal parties dancing the night away on land where people were tortured, taking selfies in front of the homes where enslavers lived. Visitors bask in nostalgia, enjoying the antiques and the scenery. But the Whitney is different. It is the only plantation museum in Louisiana with an exclusive focus on enslaved people. The old plantation house still stands—alluring in its decadence—but it’s not there to be admired. The house is a reminder of what slavery built, and the grounds are a reminder of what slavery really meant for the men, women, and children held in its grip.

Like Blandford, the Whitney also has a cemetery, of a kind. A small courtyard called the Field of Angels memorializes the 2,200 enslaved children who died in St. John the Baptist Parish from 1823 to 1863. Their names are carved into granite slabs that encircle the space. My tour guide, Yvonne, the site’s director of operations, explained that most had died of malnutrition or disease. Yvonne, who is Black, added that there were stories of some enslaved mothers killing their own babies, rather than sentencing them to a life of slavery.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Whitney was getting more than 100,000 visitors a year. I asked Yvonne if they were different from the people who might typically visit a plantation. She looked down at the names of the dead inscribed in stone. “No one is coming to the Whitney thinking they’re only coming to admire the architecture,” she said.

Did the white visitors, I asked her, experience the space differently from the Black visitors? She told me that the most common question she gets from white visitors is “I know slavery was bad … I don’t mean it this way, but … Were there any good slave owners?”

“I really give a short but nuanced answer to that,” she said. “Regardless of how these individuals fed the people that they owned, regardless of how they clothed them, regardless of if they never laid a hand on them, they were still sanctioning the system … You can’t say, ‘Hey, this person kidnapped your child, but they fed them well. They were a good person.’ How absurd does that sound?”

But so many Americans simply don’t want to hear this, and if they do hear it, they refuse to accept it. After the 2015 massacre of Black churchgoers in Charleston led to renewed questions about the memory and iconography of the Confederacy, Greg Stewart, another member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told The New York Times, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparent and great-great-grandparents were monsters.”

So much of the story we tell about history is really the story we tell about ourselves. It is the story of our mothers and fathers and their mothers and fathers, as far back as our lineages will take us. They are the stories Jeff tells as he sits watching the deer scamper among the Blandford tombstones at dusk. The stories he wants to tell his granddaughters when he holds their hands as they walk over the land. But just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.

Would Jeff’s story change, I wonder, if he went to the Whitney? Would his sense of what slavery was, and what his ancestors fought for, survive his coming face-to-face with the Whitney’s murdered rebels and lost children? Would he still be proud?

Once the bodies are exhumed, the city and its public oversight committee will determine the next steps for "storing remains, DNA testing and genealogical research, and commemorating the gravesites and honoring the remains," said a city news release.

The work — which will unfold behind a screening fence with researchers, cultural monitors, historians, morticians, a forensic anthropologist and a videographer — may take months, the city says. That's not counting the efforts to identify the bodies and determine if they are indeed victims of the massacre.

For the second year in a row, anniversary commemorations are marked by virus travel restrictions that prevented veterans or families of fallen soldiers from the U.S., Britain, Canada and other Allied countries from making the trip to France. Only a few officials were allowed exceptions.

On June 6, 1944, "In the heart of the mist that enveloped the Normandy Coast ... was a lightning bolt of freedom," French Defense Minister Florence Parly told the ceremony. "France does not forget. France is forever grateful."

Most public events have been canceled, and the official ceremonies are limited to a small number of selected guests and dignitaries.Denis van den Brink, a WWII expert working for the town of Carentan, site of a strategic battle near Utah Beach, acknowledged the "big loss, the big absence is all the veterans who couldn't travel."

Over the anniversary weekend, many local residents have come out to visit the monuments marking the key moments of the fight and show their gratitude to the soldiers. French World War II history enthusiasts, and a few travelers from neighboring European countries, could also be seen in jeeps and military vehicles on the small roads of Normandy.

Some reenactors came to Omaha Beach in the early hours of the day to pay tribute to those who fell that day, bringing flowers and American flags.

On D-Day, 4,414 Allied troops lost their lives, 2,501 of them Americans. More than 5,000 were wounded. On the German side, several thousand were killed or wounded.

The cemetery contains 9,380 graves, most of them for servicemen who lost their lives in the D-Day landings and ensuing operations. Another 1,557 names are inscribed on the Walls of the Missing.

Normandy has more than 20 military cemeteries holding mostly Americans, Germans, French, British, Canadians and Polish troops who took part in the historic battle.

But the Piers became plagued by a series of health issues, which made traveling to Arlington more difficult. Knowing they couldn't see Noah's grave as often as they wished, Mark erected a memorial on their property. And in recent years, the Piers family — all nine children and 12 grandchildren — have gathered at Mark and Vikki's on Memorial Day. They don't see it as a holiday or an event to be celebrated, but more of a day of reflection. They hang the American flag high and write letters to Noah on red balloons. They play games with the kids and cook up some of Noah's favorite foods and share stories.

It pains Mark and Vikki to have been away from the cemetery for so long. But they know they will go back as soon as possible. Vikki said she hopes that she and Mark can manage to make the journey for Noah's birthday on July 28; he would have turned 38 this year. "It breaks my heart," Vikki said. "My heart is in Arlington. It is. I'm not physically there, but I do wish I could go and just touch the ground and sit with him."

The film succeeded at doing that through a comic lens—the very thing that initially troubled me.

Wisely, Anderson avoided the war itself and its mass murder, setting his film in the period before and after instead.

A similar subtlety also characterizes the film’s musings about memory and its transmission. Zero flashes back to the 1930s from the vantage point of his 1968 conversation with a writer he meets. But the 1968 meeting is itself a flashback—it's introduced and concluded by the writer, years later, looking at the camera and describing his recollections of the meeting. And that too is a flashback: The movie opens and closes with a student seated before the writer’s memorial bust in the Prague Jewish cemetery reading those very recollections in the writer’s book, The Grand Budapest Hotel. In a month when we all thought a lot about preserving history, that rendering of how stories are passed down resonated deeply.

Finally, the film speaks to our heartbreak at the injustice of the Holocaust and our desire for some glimmer of light—but not too much.

“You see, there are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” The Grand Budapest Hotel got that just right too, and that’s no laughing matter.

According to the World Health Organization, “lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.”

The Hurley Medical Center, in Flint, released a study in September that confirmed what many Flint parents had feared for over a year: The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014.

The crisis reached a nadir Monday night, when Flint Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency. “The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster,” Weaver said in a declaratory statement. 1 of 11 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × fa fa

The mayor — elected after her predecessor, Dayne Walling, experienced fallout from his administration’s handling of the water problems — said in the statement that she was seeking support from the federal government to deal with the “irreversible” effects of lead exposure on the city’s children. Weaver thinks that these health consequences will lead to a greater need for special education and mental health services, as well as developments in the juvenile justice system.

To those living in Flint, the announcement may feel as if it has been a long time coming. Almost immediately after the city started drawing from the Flint River in April 2014, residents began complaining about the water, which they said was cloudy in appearance and emitted a foul odor.

Since then, complications from the water coming from the Flint River have only piled up. Although city and state officials initially denied that the water was unsafe, the state issued a notice informing Flint residents that their water contained unlawful levels of trihalomethanes, a chlorine byproduct linked to cancer and other diseases.

Protesters marched to City Hall in the fierce Michigan cold, calling for officials to reconnect Flint’s water to the Detroit system. The use of the Flint River was supposed to be temporary, set to end in 2016 after a pipeline to Lake Huron’s Karegnondi Water Authority is finished.

Through continued demonstrations by Flint residents and mounting scientific evidence of the water’s toxins, city and state officials offered various solutions — from asking residents to boil their water to providing them with water filters — in an attempt to work around the need to reconnect to the Detroit system.

That call was finally made by Snyder (R) on Oct. 8. He announced that he had a plan for coming up with the $12 million to switch Flint back to the Detroit system. On Oct. 16, water started flowing again from Detroit to Flint.

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the battalion formed part of the 109 Brigade of the 36th Ulster Division and assembled at the edge of Thiepval Wood. Blakey was among scores who died that day. And in subsequent letters to his wife, it emerged he had last been seen seriously wounded in No Man’s Land

The study authors acknowledge that S. enterica may have interacted with other circulating pathogens. The method does not rule them out. In particular, the team can only detect DNA, but some viruses carry RNA instead. “If all these people died from RNA viruses, we will never know, at least not with these techniques,