Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  October 2026  Wes J. Sheffield recently published a book, On a Train Leaving Texas The Journal of Charles T. Gettys, focused on medical treatment of German POWs at Camp Livingston in Central Louisiana during World War II. Sheffield met Gettys when he interviewed him about his time as Dean of […]

Jerry Sanson  Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  September 2026  The Louisiana Department of Education realized as early as 1940 that something was amiss in educational opportunities the state provided for its black citizens. According to one report produced by its staff, “neglect of the Negro [a word used commonly during the 1940s, even in official […]

Jerry Sanson  Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  September 2026  The Alexandria Town Talk newspaper featured a column entitled “News About Central Louisianians in Service” that reported news items focused on community residents serving in the military during World War II. The October 21, 1944, newspaper in the Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum collection includes an edition of the column that nominally reports on Pvt. Thomas Hank, then a patient […]

Jerry Sanson  Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  August 2026  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away at his favorite retreat, the “Little White House,” near Warm Springs, Georgia, on April 12, 1945, after suffering a massive stroke just before lunchtime. His sudden death removed the only president that younger Americans ever knew. Elected in 1932 and inaugurated in March 1933, he loomed over Washington and the […]

Jerry Sanson  Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  August 2026  One of the exhibits in the Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum that seldom fails to catch the attention of visitors includes two radically oversized weapons displayed atop a World War II artifacts case. Members of school field trip tours are especially impressed with guns that would be taller than most of them if stood […]

Jerry Sanson  Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  August 2026  World War II caused many changes in the Pelican State, including changes in population and in the distribution of people across the state. Louisiana’s population was 2,363,889 according to the 1940 United States Census and increased to 2,683,516, or about 13.5%, in 1950. Much of that population growth occurred during the first […]

Jery Sanson  Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  July 2026  Cadillac is a name in American automobile history that conjures a certain image of luxury, of floating down the highway ignoring the potholes, of arriving at the opera house or the country club dressed in your finest attire. Perhaps you envision the infamous 1959 El Dorado Biarritz with its towering tailfins, the highest ever […]

Jerry Sanson  Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  July 2026  At a time when Americans politics is a divided system and it is all too easy for someone to label as a “Nazi” or a “Fascist” another person with politically different opinions, it is worthwhile to remember an election in Louisiana during World War II when similar charges overshadowed the real […]

Jerry Sanson  Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  July 2026 Examples of uniforms on display at Jackson Barracks Military Museum Thomas Jefferson included several grievances that American colonists held against the British government as he framed the reasons for separation from the British Empire in the Declaration of Independence. One of them was the argument that […]

Jerry Sanson  Louisiana Maneuvers and Military Museum  June 2026  The United States military used different sizes of equipment as it fought its way across Africa, Europe, and the vast areas that it covered in the Pacific during World War II. One of the most unusual was the Piper J-3 Cub, a small fabric- covered airplane manufactured by Piper Aircraft between 1938 and 1947 that was known as the L-4 […]