Outing Magazine

Articles from Outing Magazine

‘How Did it Feel to be a Soldier?” (Outing Magazine, 1917)

This collection of Civil War letters, written by one of the younger members of an Illinois regiment, was printed in a men’s magazine at a time when the U.S. was gearing-up for it’s first military adventure in Europe. The editors wished only to impart to their younger readers what a soldier’s life is like:

I will try to give you some of the particulars of soldier life so far as I have tried it…We don’t have more than half enough to eat…Health is good, with the exception of dysentery.

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The Power of Positive Thought in Military Training (Outing Magazine, 1918)

The power of positive thinking is one of the necessary elements that has been ingrained within the psyche of every U.S. Army recruit for at least the past 100 years. Positive thought is the topic of this 1918 article about the wartime training of U.S. Army officer cadets at Camp Grant, Illinois, by Major Herman J. Koehler (1859 – 1927), who believed deeply that there is no limit to human endurance.


Read what the U.S. Army psychologists had to say about courage.

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The Evolution of the U.S. Army Web Belt (Outing Magazine, 1918)

The attached article, How Our Soldiers Carry Their Ammunition, was originally published in a 1918 sporting magazine and gives an account as to how one uniform element unique to the U.S. and British military establishments came into prominence during the earliest years of the Twentieth Century. Written by Paul A Curtis, Jr., the essay describes the difficulties inherit with leather belting, the British need for an alternate material in order to maintain colonial regiments in India and the father of the American web belt, General Anson Mills (1834 – 1924).


When the Doughboys complained, they complained heavily about their uniforms; read about it here.

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