Ninety-Five Years Ago Today

Although we now call it Veterans Day, November 11 was originally called Armistice Day. Ninety-five years ago today, in a railway car at Rethondes in the forest of Compiegne in France, the Allied powers signed a ceasefire agreement with Germany, and, at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the fighting in the Great War, now known as World War I, came to an end.

The photograph is from the archives of the New York Daily News and shows "the first 'unofficial' celebration of Armistice Day" in New York City, which took place on Fifth Avenue and 34th Street on November 11, 1918.