Skip to main content

E5: From Combat to the Classroom: How the G.I. Bill Changed America


Posted on

After WWII, millions of American veterans returned home and pursued higher education. This was only possible because of the monumental legislation known as the GI Bill. So many Veterans enrolled at TCU, the university was forced to add barracks to the campus for Veteran housing.


The Skiff
The Skiff, October 25, 1946

Sources

Edward Humes, Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006).

Moore, Richard. “Rent, Heat, Nearness of Barracks Please Vets.” The Skiff, January 10, 1947.

Moore, Richard. “Army Barracks.” The Skiff, October 25, 1946.

Al Russell Trio, “World War II Blues,” March 1947, Accessed December 4, 2023.

The Thomas Family, “I Ain’t Gonna Study War No More,” December 1946, Accessed December 4, 2023.

Victor Military Band, “The Caissons Go Rolling Along,” February 1942, Accessed December 4, 2023.

Victor Military Band, “The Marines’ Hymn,” February 1942. Accessed December 4, 2023.


For Further Reference

Altschuler, Glenn C. and Stuart M. Blumin. The GI Bill: The New Deal for Veterans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Mettler, Suzanne. Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Post 9/11 GI Bill.

Meet our Guest

Edward Humes is a California-based journalist and author. Mr. Humes is a Philadelphia native and has authored a large body of narrative nonfiction work. In 1989, Mr. Humes was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the military establishment in Southern California for the Orange County Register. In 2006, Mr. Humes authored Over Here: How the GI Bill Transformed the American Dream, which is the subject of our interview.

Keith Glover

Keith Glover

Keith Glover is a Senior Political Science student from Aledo, Texas. He retired from the United States Marine Corps in 2021 and is a member of the TCU Student Veteran Alliance.

Griffin Miller

Griffin Miller

Recent Episodes

  • S5 E3: Copernicus Demotes Humanity

    In this episode, student historians Viktor Lord Harrington, Lauren Flores, and Samuel Saenz tackle a myth propagated by the twentieth-century psychologist Sigmund Freud. Freud argued in an early twentieth-century lecture that the early modern revolution in astronomy which placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of the universe, had a profound effect…

  • S5 E1: Columbus Believed the Earth was Flat

    In this episode, Whitney Kay, Merit Wagstaff, and Abby Pruns tackle the myth that when Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, he and his crew—and everyone else in Europe at the time—believed the earth was flat. Sources Cited in this Episode Cohen, Richard. Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past. Simon &…

  • S5 E2: The Church Banned Dissection

    In this episode, Cooper Moog, Remington Strickland, and Wyatt Franz tackle the myth that the medieval church prohibited human dissection, supposedly setting back the progress of modern medicine by centuries. Sources Cited in this Episode Croce, Paul Jerome. “Probabilistic Darwinism: Louis Agassiz vs. Asa Gray on Science, Religion, and Certainty.” Journal of Religious History 22,…

Archive