HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Dawn of Glory

New York, Kings County, New York

Marker Inscription

IN HONOR / OF THOSE / WHO FOUGHT FOR / OUR COUNTRY / 1917-1918

The Story

"Dawn of Glory" stands at the edge of Brooklyn's Highland Park as a community's tribute to the local men who marched off to the First World War. The years carved into its base, 1917-1918, mark America's brief but costly entry into the war, when the United States sent some two million soldiers "over there" to the trenches of France and helped turn the tide against Germany. Memorials like this one rose in neighborhoods across the country in the years after the Armistice, each a bronze-and-stone act of civic grief and pride paid for by the very people whose sons had served.

Why it matters

It captures the moment the United States stepped onto the world stage as a great power, and the way ordinary American communities chose to remember the ordinary people they had sent to fight for it.

Plan your visit

Nearby

Make a day of it — museums, food, and places to stay near this marker.

Museums & culture

Attractions

Food & drink

Places to stay

Places data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Hours and details change — call ahead.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related events

  • · World War I

Themes & tags

ImmigrationMemorial

Nearby & related markers

Betty Smith 1943

New York, NY

Betty Smith drew on her own hardscrabble girlhood in Brooklyn's Williamsburg tenements to write "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," the beloved 1943 novel of a bookish girl coming of age amid the poverty and stubborn hope of early-1900s immigrant New York. The book became an instant bestseller, and its 1945 film adaptation — a landmark of American cinema — earned Academy Award recognition. This house, later restored, is where the author lived and worked as that enduring story took shape.

Women's HistoryImmigration

General Slocum Disaster Memorial

New York, NY

On the morning of June 15, 1904, the excursion steamer General Slocum caught fire in the East River while carrying more than a thousand passengers on a church outing. Most aboard were German immigrant families from Manhattan's Lower East Side neighborhood known as Little Germany, and the flames spread with terrible speed as rotted life preservers and unready lifeboats failed those on deck. The loss of over a thousand lives made it the deadliest day in New York City until the attacks of September 11, 2001.

ImmigrationTransportation

Richmond Hill Branch

New York, NY

In 1899, as the free public library movement swept American cities, Queens resident Ella Flanders — a member of the civic-minded 20th Century Club — launched a free circulating library out of Arcanum Hall on Jamaica Avenue, planting the seed of what became the Richmond Hill Branch of the Queens Borough Public Library. Women's clubs like hers were the quiet engines behind countless early American libraries, raising funds and stocking shelves at a time when tax-supported reading rooms were still a novelty. Among its first trustees was Jacob Riis, the reformer and photojournalist whose exposés of tenement life had made the case that knowledge and opportunity should reach every neighborhood.

EducationWomen's History

Bushwick War Memorial

New York, NY

In the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, this memorial honors the men of the 13th Assembly District who answered the call to serve when the United States entered the First World War in 1917. Erected in the era's wave of civic commemoration, it reflects how tightly the war effort was woven into local political and community life, right down to the assembly-district level. Monuments like this rose in neighborhoods across New York in the years after the 1918 armistice, naming and honoring the sons a community sent overseas.

ImmigrationMilitary & Wartime