Welcome to the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections

"The "American Intervention in Northern Russia, 1918-1919," nicknamed the "Polar Bear Expedition," was a U.S. military intervention in northern Russia at the end of World War I. Since many of these soldiers originated from Michigan, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, an archive documenting Michigan history, has collected materials related to this event since the 1960s. The Bentley has amassed one of the largest groups of materials on this topic, consisting of over sixty individual collections of primary source material as well as numerous published materials."

Here's another little known episode in history, that in my opinion, could be considered as the start, or cause, of the Cold War. I first learned of this years ago, and it brought sense, at least to me, of the claims of the Soviets that the U.S. had been against them from the begining. Not that the Soviets were by any stretch of the imagination "good guys", but our presence and activities on Russian, which had just become "Soviet", territory would lead to the kind of paranoia they exhibited throughout the 'official" Cold War.