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On April 24, 1996, women's basketball announced "We Got Next" as the NBA Board of Governors approved the concept of a Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) to begin play in June 1997. Since then, the WNBA has been the home for the best women's basketball talent in the world. With the league celebrating its 22nd season in 2018, take a look back at WNBA's bright history.

Jump to: Champions | All Star | Draft | Awards | WNBA20 Video Vault

The Minnesota Lynx capped a thrilling season with victory in a winner-take-all Game 5 against the Los Angeles Sparks. They joined the Houston Comets as the only franchises with four WNBA titles. Regular season MVP Sylvia Fowles also earned Finals MVP honors.

More: All-Time WNBA Champions

For the second straight All-Star Game, Maya Moore earned MVP with a spectacular performance. The Minnesota Lynx star led the West in scoring with 23 points, leading her team to a 130-121 victory over the East.

More: Past All-Star Game Results

With their first draft pick since their move to Las Vegas, the Aces selected South Carolina forward A'ja Wilson No. 1 overall in WNBA Draft 2018 at the Nike New York Headquarters.

League Info: All-Time Draft Picks | Past No. 1 Picks Gallery

Behind Sylvia Fowles, the Minnesota Lynx went 27-7 and earned the No. 1 seed in the 2017 WNBA Playoffs. A four-time WNBA All-Star and three-time WNBA Defensive Player of the Year, Fowles ranked fifth in the WNBA in scoring (18.9 ppg), second in rebounding (10.4 rpg) and tied for second in blocked shots (1.97 bpg) in 2017.

History: Awards History | Past WNBA Player of the Week awards

To celebrate the league's 20th season in 2016, WNBA.com gathered elements of the rich history, from the classic games and plays to the iconic players on and off the court. Launch Video Vault

For 21 years the WNBA has featured the game's best players and created some of the best moments in women's basketball history. Take a look back at some of the teams and players that have left their mark on this league.

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History - WNBA.com - Official Site of the WNBA

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On April 24, 1996, women's basketball announced "We Got Next" as the NBA Board of Governors approved the concept of a Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) to begin play in June 1997. Since then, the WNBA has been the home for the best women's basketball talent in the world.

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While magicians don't often reveal their secrets, you'll find some here! Your kids can use these tricks to amaze their friends. Magic tricks for kids are a great way for parents and nannies to keep the family entertained. After all, who doesn't love magic? "When I perform for kids, ...

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As one of the few humans on Earth who un-ironically calls himself a "TV magic obsessive," let me tell you, there's never been a magic show on television like Penn & Teller: Fool Us.

I approach the show from several perspectives. As a layperson, it's entertaining as hell with a clear-cut premise. Fool Us is a magic competition on the CW Television Network in which performers try to fool Penn Jillette and Teller as to how their trick was done. If they succeed, the aspiring magicians win an opening-act slot in the duo's longtime Las Vegas show. The show has been a surprise ratings hit in its Monday primetime slot, averaging 2 million viewers (it's been renewed for a third season).

I also watch the show as a guy interested in magic since age six. I'm comfortable saying Fool Us has advanced the art form within popular culture better than any televised magic show in recent memory. The variety of magic subgenres given the spotlight is encouraging for those of us who don't perform with live tigers: there've been acts of coin and card magic, mind-reading, escapology, quick change (where costumes transform in a flash)-even a man who solves Rubik's cubes, magically.

After each magician's performance, Penn and Teller confer, and using their combined century of conjuring know-how, try to work out the trick's method without revealing its secret. This postmortem is the most fascinating part of the show. Listen to how Penn (and Teller, in his silent advisory role) discuss insider terms, something considered by some magicians as heresy. Terms like "cooler," "McCombical decks," "Tamariz," and "Aronson" are of little meaning to 99.997 percent of the viewing audience, and indeed, host Jonathan Ross would often express a quizzical, "I have no idea what you're talking about." But to hear allusions to method in a public forum, even with such cryptic jargon, certainly breaks new ground for magic on television.

In the clip below, a magician manages to get one by Penn and Teller-and piss off Penn by doing so:

There are those who view Penn and Teller as magic turncoats, because they dare to allow the public in on a method or two. (In one of their best-known routines, they perform the "cups and balls" trick with clear plastic cups, ostensibly showing where the sleight of hand takes place.) These are the magicians whose relationship with secrets is ironclad: if you even once reveal the workings of a trick, you're excommunicated from the fraternity.

In the magic community, you'll find backlash to the show for the aforementioned reasons, but most magicians I know view Fool Us as a net positive. It has nothing to do with fooling audiences. Really, the phrase "fool us" is the pithy elevator pitch to get on network television. The greater motivation of the show, I think, is having experienced magicians cogently articulate the merits of a performance, which in turn helps the lay public better appreciate magic. Trust me, you're better off having Penn and Teller explain what's good about a magic act than Scary Spice or Howie Mandel.

I spoke with Teller (now his full legal name), the famously silent partner of Penn, about Fool Us, magic, and the sanctity of secrets.
Vanity Fair: Having a magic show called Fool Us would lead most to believe the end goal of magic is to fool someone. I suspect your motivation is more nuanced than that.
Teller: What's the end goal for any work of art? The answer is it's not one thing. In almost every work of art there is on one level-and this is the level at which magic is, I think, the most fundamental-at which you must amaze the audience. When you're an actor, you must, for the moment you're there, convince the audience that you are possessed by the spirit of this character. And there is a level in which you go, "Wow, I really thought for that moment, that the character onstage was Hamlet." That amazement is the bottom line of any work of art.
Magicians get into magic because they're seduced by the feeling of amazement. The ironic thing is, the deeper they dive into magic, the less often they get fooled. That seems immeasurably cruel.
The deeper you get into magic, the more profound your amazement becomes. There's an intermediary stage where you go, "Oh, is that all there is? It was just a thread?" And then when you work with a thread for four years, and you work out what must exactly be done to make that thread into something that is profound and difficult to imagine could be the cause of whatever it is you're doing to it, you veer right into a different kind of amazement. It's the amazement of the knowledgeable person. It's the amazement of the astronomer who has studied everything about the stars that is available, and who sees and understands the mechanisms that we know about, but is able to appreciate how mysterious it all is in the larger picture.
So you can be just as amazed by the thought process that goes into creating a trick?
There's a trick I do in our live show based loosely on David P. Abbott's Floating Ball. I experimented with that trick for 18 months to come up with a routine in which the idea was no longer the ball was going to float, but the ball was coming to life. I spend one hour onstage every night after my show experimenting. And the more I experimented, the more wondrous the situation got for me. I was no longer wondering at the same thing the audience was wondering at. I was in astonishment at how the simple idea of a thread with an angle of something riding on it; the variety of incredible illusory movements it could provide.

Penn introduces that trick in our show by saying, "Now here's a trick that's done with a piece of thread." We say that ahead of time because what we discovered was an audience accustomed to elaborate mechanical and electronic modes of propulsion was inclined to think the movement of this red ball was just some sort of remote-control thing. Whereas magicians who knew how the trick was done appreciated the fact that at every moment, I was disproving the possibility of the thread that they knew was there. So by letting the audience in on the fact that it was done by means of a thread, we created more amazement.
The fact you let people in on the modus operandi makes it no longer feel like a confrontational relationship with the audience. The magician isn't saying, "I'm superior to you because I fooled you," but, "Let's share in this amazing moment."
Long ago, when we originated our clear "cups and balls" routine, we were taken to task by a number of magicians who said, "You're exposing the cups and balls!" What they didn't realize was the trick did not originate with the idea of exposure. The trick originated . . . I'll demonstrate for you . . .

[ We're sitting at a bar, and Teller gets a clear cup and balls of aluminum foil from a nearby table.]

Penn and I were sitting in a diner, and I was messing around with rolled-up napkins. As I'm talking I'll often fiddle with stuff. I noticed that when I did that move, one didn't see the load, even though it was in full view.

[ Teller makes one ball disappear from his hand, and it reappears inside the clear plastic cup sitting on the table.]

That phenomenon of your attention being taken away from something by a very natural action seemed to be truly, profoundly amazing. The subject for a piece of magic. So we developed a routine with clear cups, but of course, it would seem pretentious for us to say, "Note how you could both see the secret action and the ostensible action at the same time! Isn't that an interesting counterpoint?" So we decided to present it as though it was an exposé, and magicians of course being terribly naïve, believed us.

We were taken to task by one magician who came to our show and took a swing at Penn in the lobby for the evil that we were doing. Penn said, "Why don't we just go to the diner and have a chat?" So this magician sat down with us and said, "All right, whose side are you on anyway?" That's the fundamental problem with much of magical performance. Merely because a magician is trying to create a moment in which a spectator is astounded, the magicians often conceive of themselves as being in opposition to their audience. That is something Penn and I are violently against. We do not believe the audience is stupid. We believe many, many, many, many-perhaps most of the audience-is a great deal smarter than we are. Therefore, they need to be shown the respect to be treated as peers.
Are magicians a territorial bunch?
There's an aesthetic rule in magic that to allow the audience to be amazed, you don't explain your trick. That part of your job is to withhold and conceal certain pieces of information in order to bring the audience to a level of astonishment. It is an aesthetic rule, not a moral rule. However, it has gradually seeped into magic lore as being a moral rule. "Giving away a trick is an evil deed." No it's not! The person who wrote the magic book that got you started in magic gave away a trick. Was that an evil deed? No!

In Tim's Vermeer, our friend Tim Jenison believes that he has discovered the method by which Vermeer got such photo-realistic effects. Knowing that does not in any way diminish my astonishment at looking at a Vermeer painting. Alexander Pope wrote, "A little learning is a dangerous thing/ drink deep, or not taste the Pierian spring." He's talking about exactly that. A little learning can spoil magic. A lot of learning enhances it.
Let's talk about Fool Us. What's your end goal for the show?
One of the problems with magic on television is home viewers generally have a feeling the depiction of the magical event is being slanted by the way it's shot. Anyone who claims they can watch a piece of magic without trying to figure out how it's done is lying. One of the fundamental joys of magic is it's an intellectual art form at one level, and as a viewer, you're trying to reconcile what you see with what you know. The joy of it is going, "That's impossible! No it can't be. Yes it is! No it can't be. Yes it is!" And these two things are colliding-what you see is colliding with what you know. The sparks are coming from this dissonance between what all of your experience tells you and what you're presently experiencing. The joy of that dissonance is considerable.

But when you see it on television, you never feel that. "I'm not here in the room, I couldn't control where my eyes are going." Part of what Fool Us is designed to do is, without saying it, is to say what you're seeing is really what somebody in the theater is seeing. We do that by focusing on this one silly and trivial aspect of magic, which is, how's the trick done? We don't even know what acts are going to be on the show. We're genuinely trying to see if we can figure out what's going on.
The most interesting part of the show is after each performance, Penn talks in this magician doublespeak to clue in the audience to the trick's method. How much of this is trying to maintain the secret, and how much is coding to teenagers interested in magic where they can learn these techniques?
It's all of that. When Penn talks about magic, he tries not to spoil the trick for the home audience-that takes away the fun for people who want to watch it over and over again, or people just delighted by the effect. So Penn deliberately uses jargon terms that will communicate to the magician and to the community of magicians that we do know indeed what's going on, without wrecking the trick for the home audience.

There also really is, precisely, a way to encourage people who are interested in magic to learn more. If we say, "Does the term 'breather crimp' mean anything to you?" That takes somebody who might be really interested in card magic to Google "breather crimp," and they're going to learn a really cool thing that they might be able to use.
Much of magic is now consumed on YouTube. Do you now have to come up with tricks that could withstand multiple replays? Does this change the way you create magic?
It sometimes does, and it sometimes doesn't. For example, the tricks we do on Fool Us are generally tricks we've done in our live shows. They're polished enough that they deceive and amaze a live audience. If you rewind it a zillion times and study them out, maybe you could figure out what's going on here. That doesn't bother me. I'm just providing more entertainment for you. It's levels of participation that are now allowed by recording that we didn't have in former times. If you watch it a zillion times and you go, "I think it happened right there," that's a delight for you!
The sanctity of secrets: Are the secrets as sacrosanct today as they were to a past generation?
To some people. I'm mystified by the obsession of popular writers with magic secrets. Everyone who writes about magic should read [author] Jim Steinmeyer's description of magic secrets. He says the most important secret in magic is that most people believe there's a safe somewhere that contains all the magic secrets that's heavily guarded and carefully locked. The biggest secret magicians have to keep is that that safe is empty.
Related: 72 Hours Inside the Eye-Popping World of Cardistry

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Penn and Teller Are Revealing How Magic Tricks Are Done-And It's O.K.

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As one of the few humans on Earth who un-ironically calls himself a "TV magic obsessive," let me tell you, there's never been a magic show on television like Penn & Teller: Fool Us. I approach the show from several perspectives. As a layperson, it's entertaining as hell with a clear-cut premise.

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NCVA | Northern California Volleyball Association

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Founded in 1982, Northern California Volleyball Association (NCVA) is a 501c3 non-profit organization recognized as the Regional Volleyball Association (RVA) for all of Northern California and Northern Nevada.

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Looking for drills to improve your spiking, passing or setting? Or are you looking for a way to transition throughout the court or place that perfect serve? We have numerous volleyball drills that can help you in all of your volleyball skills!

Coaching a team and need some ideas for drills? There are several drills listed that will keep the younger athletes engaged while working on developing their skills.

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Volleyball.Com - Get the latest news and list of camps and clubs.

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Looking for drills to improve your spiking, passing or setting? Or are you looking for a way to transition throughout the court or place that perfect serve? We have numerous volleyball drills that can help you in all of your volleyball skills! Coaching a team and need some ideas for drills?

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Timetoast's free timeline maker lets you create timelines online. Make educational timelines or create a timeline for your company website. How to make a timeline? Well, it's easy as toast!

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Olympics | Olympic Games, Medals, Results, News | IOC

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Official website of the Olympic Games. Find results, video highlights and medal counts by sport, athlete and country from the PyeongChang 2018 Olympics. Easily access historic results from all past Games, plus breaking news on Tokyo 2020 and other future Games.

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United States History - American Civil War - World War One - World War Two - Ancient History - Roman History - Renaissance History - Ancient Greek History - Ancient Egypt History - The History of Things

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Kansas Humane Society | Animal Shelter | Wichita, KS

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Kansas Humane Society offers pet adoption, pet rescue, outreach, education & more. Click here to adopt, donate, or volunteer at our Wichita animal shelter.

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Learn about World War I including the countries, leaders, alliances, major battles, causes, trench warfare, and timeline. The War to End All Wars was fought mostly in Europe between the Allies and the Central Powers. It was also called the Great War.

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World War I stunned America. Anti-German feelings ran high and inspired a propaganda campaign that often turned into a witch hunt (the First Red Scare). Many Americans rejected the positive view of human nature they held before the war and, reeling from the economic and emotional depression the war inflicted, embraced a foreign policy that would not involve the U.S.

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Drawing from the unique and extensive National WWI Museum and Memorial collection, including hundreds of albums and thousands of individual photos, showcases a careful selection of over 300 images and reproduced albums in full that chronicle intimate experiences and transform our understanding of the Great War. Open Oct. 29, 2021 - April 3, 2022 in Wylie Gallery.

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Drawing from the unique and extensive National WWI Museum and Memorial collection, including hundreds of albums and thousands of individual photos, showcases a careful selection of over 300 images and reproduced albums in full that chronicle intimate experiences and transform our understanding of the Great War. Open Oct.

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Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Tensions had been brewing throughout Europe-especially in the troubled Balkan region of southeast Europe-for years before World War I actually broke out.

A number of alliances involving European powers, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and other parties had existed for years, but political instability in the Balkans (particularly Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina) threatened to destroy these agreements.

The spark that ignited World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand -heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire-was shot to death along with his wife, Sophie, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. Princip and other nationalists were struggling to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand set off a rapidly escalating chain of events: Austria-Hungary, like many countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Serbian nationalism once and for all.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

Because mighty Russia supported Serbia, Austria-Hungary waited to declare war until its leaders received assurance from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause. Austro-Hungarian leaders feared that a Russian intervention would involve Russia's ally, France, and possibly Great Britain as well.

On July 5, Kaiser Wilhelm secretly pledged his support, giving Austria-Hungary a so-called carte blanche, or "blank check" assurance of Germany's backing in the case of war. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary then sent an ultimatum to Serbia, with such harsh terms as to make it almost impossible to accept.

World War I Begins

Convinced that Austria-Hungary was readying for war, the Serbian government ordered the Serbian army to mobilize and appealed to Russia for assistance. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe's great powers quickly collapsed.

Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Serbia had lined up against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun.

The Western Front

According to an aggressive military strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan (named for its mastermind, German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen), Germany began fighting World War I on two fronts, invading France through neutral Belgium in the west and confronting Russia in the east.

On August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the border into Belgium. In the first battle of World War I, the Germans assaulted the heavily fortified city of Liege, using the most powerful weapons in their arsenal-enormous siege cannons-to capture the city by August 15. The Germans left death and destruction in their wake as they advanced through Belgium toward France, shooting civilians and executing a Belgian priest they had accused of inciting civilian resistance.

First Battle of the Marne

In the First Battle of the Marne, fought from September 6-9, 1914, French and British forces confronted the invading German army, which had by then penetrated deep into northeastern France, within 30 miles of Paris. The Allied troops checked the German advance and mounted a successful counterattack, driving the Germans back to the north of the Aisne River.

The defeat meant the end of German plans for a quick victory in France. Both sides dug into trenches, and the Western Front was the setting for a hellish war of attrition that would last more than three years.

Particularly long and costly battles in this campaign were fought at Verdun (February-December 1916) and the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916). German and French troops suffered close to a million casualties in the Battle of Verdun alone.

World War I Books and Art

The bloodshed on the battlefields of the Western Front, and the difficulties its soldiers had for years after the fighting had ended, inspired such works of art as " All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque and " In Flanders Fields"by Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. In the latter poem, McCrae writes from the perspective of the fallen soldiers:

Published in 1915, the poem inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.

Visual artists like Otto Dix of Germany and British painters Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash and David Bomberg used their firsthand experience as soldiers in World War I to create their art, capturing the anguish of trench warfare and exploring the themes of technology, violence and landscapes decimated by war.

The Eastern Front

On the Eastern Front of World War I, Russian forces invaded the German-held regions of East Prussia and Poland but were stopped short by German and Austrian forces at the Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914.

Despite that victory, Russia's assault forced Germany to move two corps from the Western Front to the Eastern, contributing to the German loss in the Battle of the Marne.

Combined with the fierce Allied resistance in France, the ability of Russia's huge war machine to mobilize relatively quickly in the east ensured a longer, more grueling conflict instead of the quick victory Germany had hoped to win under the Schlieffen Plan.

Russian Revolution

From 1914 to 1916, Russia's army mounted several offensives on World War I's Eastern Front but was unable to break through German lines.

Defeat on the battlefield, combined with economic instability and the scarcity of food and other essentials, led to mounting discontent among the bulk of Russia's population, especially the poverty-stricken workers and peasants. This increased hostility was directed toward the imperial regime of Czar Nicholas II and his unpopular German-born wife, Alexandra.

Russia's simmering instability exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1917, spearheaded by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which ended czarist rule and brought a halt to Russian participation in World War I.

Russia reached an armistice with the Central Powers in early December 1917, freeing German troops to face the remaining Allies on the Western Front.

America Enters World War I

At the outbreak of fighting in 1914, the United States remained on the sidelines of World War I, adopting the policy of neutrality favored by President Woodrow Wilson while continuing to engage in commerce and shipping with European countries on both sides of the conflict.

Neutrality, however, it was increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of Germany's unchecked submarine aggression against neutral ships, including those carrying passengers. In 1915, Germany declared the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a war zone, and German U-boats sunk several commercial and passenger vessels, including some U.S. ships.

Widespread protest over the sinking by U-boat of the British ocean liner Lusitania-traveling from New York to Liverpool, England with hundreds of American passengers onboard-in May 1915 helped turn the tide of American public opinion against Germany. In February 1917, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war.

Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships the following month, and on April 2 Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany.

Gallipoli Campaign

With World War I having effectively settled into a stalemate in Europe, the Allies attempted to score a victory against the Ottoman Empire, which entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers in late 1914.

After a failed attack on the Dardanelles (the strait linking the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean Sea), Allied forces led by Britain launched a large-scale land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915. The invasion also proved a dismal failure, and in January 1916 Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the peninsula after suffering 250,000 casualties.

Did you know? The young Winston Churchill, then first lord of the British Admiralty, resigned his command after the failed Gallipoli campaign in 1916, accepting a commission with an infantry battalion in France.

British-led forces also combated the Ottoman Turks in Egypt and Mesopotamia, while in northern Italy, Austrian and Italian troops faced off in a series of 12 battles along the Isonzo River, located at the border between the two nations.

Battle of the Isonzo

The First Battle of the Isonzo took place in the late spring of 1915, soon after Italy's entrance into the war on the Allied side. In the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, also known as the Battle of Caporetto (October 1917), German reinforcements helped Austria-Hungary win a decisive victory.

After Caporetto, Italy's allies jumped in to offer increased assistance. British and French-and later, American-troops arrived in the region, and the Allies began to take back the Italian Front.

World War I at Sea

In the years before World War I, the superiority of Britain's Royal Navy was unchallenged by any other nation's fleet, but the Imperial German Navy had made substantial strides in closing the gap between the two naval powers. Germany's strength on the high seas was also aided by its lethal fleet of U-boat submarines.

After the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915, in which the British mounted a surprise attack on German ships in the North Sea, the German navy chose not to confront Britain's mighty Royal Navy in a major battle for more than a year, preferring to rest the bulk of its naval strategy on its U-boats.

The biggest naval engagement of World War I, the Battle of Jutland (May 1916) left British naval superiority on the North Sea intact, and Germany would make no further attempts to break an Allied naval blockade for the remainder of the war.

World War I Planes

World War I was the first major conflict to harness the power of planes. Though not as impactful as the British Royal Navy or Germany's U-boats, the use of planes in World War I presaged their later, pivotal role in military conflicts around the globe.

At the dawn of World War I, aviation was a relatively new field; the Wright brothers took their first sustained flight just eleven years before, in 1903. Aircraft were initially used primarily for reconnaissance missions. During the First Battle of the Marne, information passed from pilots allowed the allies to exploit weak spots in the German lines, helping the Allies to push Germany out of France.

The first machine guns were successfully mounted on planes in June of 1912 in the United States, but were imperfect; if timed incorrectly, a bullet could easily destroy the propeller of the plane it came from. The Morane-Saulnier L, a French plane, provided a solution: The propeller was armored with deflector wedges that prevented bullets from hitting it. The Morane-Saulnier Type L was used by the French, the British Royal Flying Corps (part of the Army), the British Royal Navy Air Service and the Imperial Russian Air Service. The British Bristol Type 22 was another popular model used for both reconnaissance work and as a fighter plane.

Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker improved upon the French deflector system in 1915. His "interrupter" synchronized the firing of the guns with the plane's propeller to avoid collisions. Though his most popular plane during WWI was the single-seat Fokker Eindecker, Fokker created over 40 kinds of airplanes for the Germans.

The Allies debuted the Handley-Page HP O/400, the first two-engine bomber, in 1915. As aerial technology progressed, long-range heavy bombers like Germany's Gotha G.V. (first introduced in 1917) were used to strike cities like London. Their speed and maneuverability proved to be far deadlier than Germany's earlier Zeppelin raids.

By the war's end, the Allies were producing five times more aircraft than the Germans. On April 1, 1918, the British created the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the first air force to be a separate military branch independent from the navy or army.

Second Battle of the Marne

With Germany able to build up its strength on the Western Front after the armistice with Russia, Allied troops struggled to hold off another German offensive until promised reinforcements from the United States were able to arrive.

On July 15, 1918, German troops launched what would become the last German offensive of the war, attacking French forces (joined by 85,000 American troops as well as some of the British Expeditionary Force) in the Second Battle of the Marne. The Allies successfully pushed back the German offensive and launched their own counteroffensive just three days later.

After suffering massive casualties, Germany was forced to call off a planned offensive further north, in the Flanders region stretching between France and Belgium, which was envisioned as Germany's best hope of victory.

The Second Battle of the Marne turned the tide of war decisively towards the Allies, who were able to regain much of France and Belgium in the months that followed.

The Harlem Hellfighters and Other All-Black Regiments

By the time World War I began, there were four all-Black regiments in the U.S. military: the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry. All four regiments comprised of celebrated soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War and American-Indian Wars, and served in the American territories. But they were not deployed for overseas combat in World War I.

Blacks serving alongside white soldiers on the front lines in Europe was inconceivable to the U.S. military. Instead, the first African American troops sent overseas served in segregated labor battalions, restricted to menial roles in the Army and Navy, and shutout of the Marines, entirely. Their duties mostly included unloading ships, transporting materials from train depots, bases and ports, digging trenches, cooking and maintenance, removing barbed wire and inoperable equipment, and burying soldiers.

Facing criticism from the Black community and civil rights organizations for its quotas and treatment of African American soldiers in the war effort, the military formed two Black combat units in 1917, the 92nd and 93rd Divisions. Trained separately and inadequately in the United States, the divisions fared differently in the war. The 92nd faced criticism for their performance in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in September 1918. The 93rd Division, however, had more success.

With dwindling armies, France asked America for reinforcements, and General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, sent regiments in the 93 Division to over, since France had experience fighting alongside Black soldiers from their Senegalese French Colonial army. The 93 Division's 369 regiment, nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters, fought so gallantly, with a total of 191 days on the front lines, longer than any AEF regiment, that France awarded them the Croix de Guerre for their heroism. More than 350,000 African American soldiers would serve in World War I in various capacities.

Toward Armistice

By the fall of 1918, the Central Powers were unraveling on all fronts.

Despite the Turkish victory at Gallipoli, later defeats by invading forces and an Arab revolt that destroyed the Ottoman economy and devastated its land, and the Turks signed a treaty with the Allies in late October 1918.

Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among its diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4. Facing dwindling resources on the battlefield, discontent on the homefront and the surrender of its allies, Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, 1918, ending World War I.

Treaty of Versailles

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Allied leaders stated their desire to build a post-war world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such a devastating scale.

Some hopeful participants had even begun calling World War I "the War to End All Wars." But the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, would not achieve that lofty goal.

Saddled with war guilt, heavy reparations and denied entrance into the League of Nations, Germany felt tricked into signing the treaty, having believed any peace would be a "peace without victory," as put forward by President Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points speech of January 1918.

As the years passed, hatred of the Versailles treaty and its authors settled into a smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted among the causes of World War II.

World War I Casualties

World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded. Civilian casualties numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.

The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four venerable imperial dynasties: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey.

Legacy of World War I

World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the workforce to replace men who went to war and those who never came back. The first global war also helped to spread one of the world's deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.

World War I has also been referred to as "the first modern war." Many of the technologies now associated with military conflict-machine guns, tanks, aerial combat and radio communications-were introduced on a massive scale during World War I.

The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes against their continued use. The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in 1925, restricted the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare and remain in effect today.

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World War I began in 1914, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and lasted until 1918. During the conflict, Germany, Austria‑Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers).

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It has become a social media sensation and even led to a run on glue sales. We're talking slime - and not the green liquid Nickelodeon famously dumps on celebrities. And for many young people on YouTube, Instagram and Etsy, it's a moneymaker.

Of the more than 5 million posts on Instagram tagged with #slime, most depict brightly colored stuff filled with glitter and pigments of all kinds. So the slime of today is far more viscous and elaborate than that green liquid on Nickelodeon. Slime has become so popular that the American Chemical Society recently published a fact sheet about it including a detailed scientific explanation for how the magic happens.

This gooey DIY toy is taking the Internet by storm, mostly in the form of Instagram videos showing only a set of hands squishing and stretching various types of slime.

Slime is also popular among YouTubers. In June, The New York Times did a profile on Karina Garcia, one of a handful of influencers considered to have started the trend. Known as the "slime queen," Garcia has just over 6 million subscribers and makes as much as $200,000 a month from sponsorships on her various slime recipe videos.

Garcia's is just one of hundreds of YouTube and Instagram accounts that have capitalized on the growing slime trend.

Many young slime lovers are also selling their slime online, on platforms like Etsy. These entrepreneurs, often as young as 10 or 11, are making thousands of dollars each month to put toward college or invest back into their slime business.

The owner of the Instagram page " slime.jewel", an account with over 500,000 followers, says that when she started making videos last year she never imagined she would be making money off slime. "It was initially driven by passion to create," says slime.jewel, who declined to give her real name. But when profits started rolling in she began investing in scents and glitters, which only increased her profits further.

Searches for slime on Etsy have soared since last October, the reported, citing the company. The popular and often viral Instagram slime videos serve as marketing for individually owned slime businesses. Most slime batches sell for between $5 and $10, but range up to $25 for the largest batches. Thousands of Etsy shops sell slimes ranging from "Fruit Salad Clear Slime" to "Strawberry Champagne Metallic Slime." These slimes are often brightly colored, and are filled with creative add-ins like Styrofoam balls and plastic beads that give slimes different textures and different sounds when played with.

The crackling, popping, and squishing noises associated with slime videos have earned slime a spot on the short list of another growing Internet trend, popular among adults. Along with whispering, scratching and tapping noises, and clips of Bob Ross (famous for his TV show The Joy Of Painting), slime videos have been identified as a common trigger of ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response.

ASMR, a term coined in 2010 on a Facebook group, refers to a sensation defined as "a combination of positive feelings, relaxation and a distinct, static-like tingling sensation on the skin," according to one of a very few peer-reviewed studies on ASMR. The same study found that, although not all people experience ASMR, of those participants who did, 98 percent agreed that they used ASMR largely as an opportunity for relaxation. "I can only describe what I started feeling as an extremely relaxed trance like state, that I didn't want to end," one study participant said.

Emma Barratt, one of the authors of that ASMR study, confirms that slime videos fit well into the list of ASMR triggers. "Something about the predictable way in which these materials are moving or being manipulated can bring about the same sort of flow-like feeling created by ASMR videos," she says. Barratt says the rise of the use of slime videos for ASMR "might be a useful avenue in helping us further untangle just what stimuli are needed to have an effective ASMR trigger."

The growing popularity of the slime trend has created glue shortages in many craft stores around the country as kids and adults alike buy up bottles in bulk.

Elmer's said it experienced a 50 percent jump in sales in December as a direct result of the slime trend. Subsequently, Elmer's has been capitalizing on the slime trend, launching a new television commercial featuring "kid-friendly" recipes to make slime.

This "kid-friendly" aspect comes in the wake of concerns over the safety of slime. The most basic slime recipe consists of a PVA based glue (for most consumers that is Elmer's), water and borax. A traditional slime recipe calls for the borax to be safely diluted in water, but when this laundry additive is touched directly it can lead to painful chemical burns. Although few kids have actually been hurt by the slime-making process, Elmer's chooses only to post borax-free slime recipes, featuring alternatives like baking soda and contact lens solution.

Elmer's has had a team of researchers and chemists focused on fueling the slime craze since it picked up major traction in the beginning of 2017, says Caitlin Watkins, a public relations manager at Newell Brands, which owns Elmer's. "At this point, everyone who touches the business has made slime," she says. "R&D experts have made it, marketing folks have made it, legal teams - even our CEO has made slime."

According to Google Trends, searches for the word "slime" peaked at the beginning of August, but the general upward trend for the past year implies that the slime craze is far from over.
Ema Sagner is the NPR Treasury and Risk Management intern.

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It has become a social media sensation and even led to a run on glue sales. We're talking slime - and not the green liquid Nickelodeon famously dumps on celebrities. And for many young people on YouTube, Instagram and Etsy, it's a moneymaker.