As we celebrated the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I in 2018, we recalled the extraordinary acts of heroism, both individual and cultural, which contributed to bringing about the war's conclusion. Reims, France, was literally at the front lines of the war. The two hundred–plus miles of caves below the city, quarried by Romans in the third and fourth centuries ad and adopted for wine production and storage by the champagne industry in modern times, became a place of refuge for the citizens of Reims, as well as for French soldiers heading to and returning from the war. The local people who remained during the war rode out more than a thousand continuous days of bombing by living in the caves, where butchers set up shop, children attended school, Christian worship services were given, and musical concerts took place. Meanwhile, the champagne industry continued to produce wine under incredibly harsh conditions. This article tells the incredible story of survival in the face of the war both for the citizens of Reims and the champagne industry, and how the war contributed to the industry subsequently solving problems that had plagued it for decades.

The short fiction of modernist author Katherine Mansfield, in particular her work written during World War I, provides a distinctive glimpse into the civilian culture of war. Mansfield uses food imagery in her writing to accentuate a shifting sensibility and profoundly emotional response to her own experience of the war. Embedded throughout her letters, notebooks, and short fiction written during and soon after the Great War, are references to food, especially to meat. Mansfield's food imagery and her artistic manipulation of the act of consuming food politicizes her work and compels a reconsideration of several pieces of short fiction which engage the event of war.

During the 1920s the image of dairy cows in a pastoral setting was a complex, ideologically-charged motif. The cow was one of American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi's (1889––1953) signature iconographic emblems at this time. This article briefly assesses autobiographical, geographic, stylistic, and symbolic meanings the subject held for the artist before considering Cows in Pasture (1923, Corcoran Gallery of Art) alongside contemporaneous imagery and rhetoric employed by the U.S. dairy industry and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the decade following World War I, when milk was being marketed as the perfect food for future generations of Americans. Considering Kuniyoshi's penchant for creating images that engage with dairy advertisements that incorporated idyllic images of America's rural past inflected with nationalist ideology and Christian religious iconography complicates prior interpretations of his images of cows.