I won’t be blogging here, but I want to share a bit about this cover photo:

On the 2022 anniversary of D-Day, I visited Omaha Beach in Normandy, France to honor my long since past grandfather, Floyd Stamilio. I was deeply moved by this place. This photo is my attempt to capture the horrifying distance that my grandfather was tasked with traversing. In the face of a wall of bullets, he crawled three hundred meters over this blood-soaked beach. That grassy embankment provided his salvation, my family’s future, and the beginning of an east-bound anti-fascist project that swept across Europe.

As a historian, I understand the invasion of D-Day in two main contexts: the martial facts of the actual day and the usable nature of the historical memory. But my own personal experience overwhelms the other two, and as I attempt to understand histories in which I am not a subject, I remember the overwhelming feeling I experienced standing on that beach.