Armistice Day and Veterans Day

Need a break from holiday prep? Us too.

So let’s pause to consider that yesterday was Armistice Day, the end of what was once called the Great War. The geopolitical world map had profoundly and permanently changed. People at all levels of society were reeling from the previously unimaginable scale of the conflict. On the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Anno Domini 1918, world leaders swore they would learn from the horror of the past few years and lay down their arms for good. The word “armistice” actually means to still one’s arms.

Of course, in the five score and five years since then, we have had another global war, even worse in scale, and numerous smaller but still devastating wars scattered around the world. Some are ongoing. But while it’s sobering to realize this, it’s equally important to remember that one good thing came from all the loss: in the US, Armistice Day became Veterans Day in 1948, to honor all veterans and their efforts to preserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

We’re reaching back this Nov 11 to the very beginning of WWI. Before Veterans Day, before the Great War had been renamed merely the first World War, before it had even started, Europe looked very different than it does today. The coins in our products such as the Twilight of the Empires box (and billfold), or the Black Hand mini, are from just before the outbreak of WWI. They have seen everything that has happened in the past 100+ years, and in some sense they are the last surviving remnants of the world before.