| From February
8, 1918, to June 13, 1919, by order of General John J. Pershing, the United States
Army published a newspaper for its forces in France, The Stars
and Stripes. This tremendous collection of newspapers includes
the complete seventy-one-week run of the newspaper's World
War I edition.
When The Stars and Stripes began publication, American forces
were dispersed throughout the Western Front, often mixed
at the unit level with British, French, and Italian forces.
The newspaper's mission was to provide these scattered troops
with a sense of unity and an understanding of their part
in the overall war effort.
The eight-page weekly featured
news from home, sports news, poetry, and cartoons, with a
staff that included journalists Alexander Woollcott, Harold
Ross, and Grantland Rice. Printing the paper on presses borrowed
from Paris newspaper plants, the staff used a network of
trains, automobiles, and a motorcycle to deliver the news
to the doughboys (as the American soldiers were called).
At
the peak of its production, The Stars and Stripes had a circulation
of 526,000 readers. |
|
 |
