History Commons^™

Ms-053: Charles D. Ryan, 66th Engineers, Meggan D. Smith

All Finding Aids

The collection consists primarily of letters from Charles Ryan to Elizabeth Dooling, his wife-to-be. The letters to Elizabeth begin on March 29, 1918 and the final one in the collection is dated June 3, 1919. The only other items in the collection is an envelope addressed to Elizabeth Dooling from Charles Ryan, a newspaper clipping of Ryan’s marriage to Elizabeth, a blank postcard with two soldiers on the front, and a letter to Ryan from the Treasury Department.

Although Ryan briefly mentions significant events, such as Germany being defeated and Italy leaving the Peace Conference, his letters focus largely on …

Ms-056: World War Ii German Prisoners Of War Collection, Keith R. Swaney

All Finding Aids

Major Laurence C. Thomas directed the German POW camp on the Emmitsburg Road in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and a camp in Pine Grove Furnace, about fifteen miles north. Members of the intelligence corps apparently confiscated the items written in German from the prisoners of war.

The World War II German POW Collection consists of those confiscated materials from the prisoners. It is composed of two series: I. Materials likely confiscated by the intelligence corps and II. Miscellaneous newspaper clippings.

Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include …

An Ideological War Of 'Blood And Soil' And Its Effect On The Agricultural Propaganda And Policy Of The Nazi Party, 1929-1939, Keith R. Swaney

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

“One then builds a whole system of thought on such a brief, crisply formulated idea. The idea does not remain limited to this single statement; rather it is applied to every aspect of daily life and becomes the guide for all human activity. It becomes a worldview.” Dr. Joseph Goebbels spoke those words on January 9, 1928 to an audience of party members at the “Hochschule fuer Politik,” a series of talks that investigated the role of propaganda in the National Socialist movement. A few months prior to this event, voters had elected a farmer, Werner Willikens, in the South …

The "Powerful", Molly Kay Gale

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

History is written by the powerful. It is true that since the 1960s and the beginnings of the democratization of history, less powerful minorities have taken up the pen and more profusely expressed their views of history, but to a great extent, white males have engrained their view of history into people’s minds. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps because of its appealing nature, or perhaps for both reasons, the Renaissance stands out in people’s minds as a definitive period in history—a period during which, arguably, intellectual and cultural progress swept across Europe.

The driving force behind much of the intellectual …