The Great War’s bitter outcome left the experience largely overlooked and forgotten in American history. This timely book is a reexamination of America’s first global experience as we commemorate WWI's centennial. The U.S. steered clear of the Great War for more than two years, but President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly led the divided country into the conflict with the goal of making the world “safe for democracy.” The country assumed a global role for the first time and attempted to build the foundations for world peace, only to witness the experience go badly awry and it retreated into isolationism.The Great War was the first continent-wide conflagration in a century, and it drew much of the world into its fire. By the end, four empires and their royal houses had fallen, communism was unleashed, the map of the Middle East was redrawn, and the United States emerged as a global power—only to withdraw from the world’s stage.The United States was disillusioned with what it achieved in the earlier war and withdrew into itself. Americans have tried to forget about it ever since. The Great War in America presents an opportunity to reexamine the country’s role on the global stage and the tremendous political and social changes that overtook the nation because of the war.
Immediately after the armistice was signed in November, 1918, an American journalist asked Paul von Hindenburg who won the war against Germany. He was the chief of the German General Staff, co-architect with Erich Ludendorff of Germany’s Eastern Front victories and its nearly war-winning Western Front offensives, and he did not hesitate in his answer. “The American infantry,” he said. He made it even more specific, telling the reporter that the final death blow for Germany was delivered by “the American infantry in the Argonne.” The British and the French often denigrated the American contribution to the war, but they had begged for US entry into the conflict, and their stake in America’s victory was, if anything, even greater than that of the United States itself. But How America Won WWI will not litigate the points of view of Britain and France. The book will accepts as gospel the assessment of the top German leader whose job it had been to oppose the Americans directly - that the American infantry won the war - and this book will tell how the American infantry did it.
For the centenary of America's entry into World War I, A. Scott Berg presents a landmark anthology of American writing from the cataclysmic conflict that set the course of the 20th century. Few Americans appreciate the significance and intensity of America's experience of World War I, the global cataclysm that transformed the modern world. Published to mark the centenary of the U.S. entry into the conflict, World War I: Told by the Americans Who Lived It brings together a wide range of writings by American participants and observers to tell a vivid and dramatic firsthand story from the outbreak of war in 1914 through the Armistice, the Paris Peace Conference, and the League of Nations debate. The eighty-eight men and women collected in the volume--soldiers, airmen, nurses, diplomats, statesmen, political activists, journalists--provide unique insights into how Americans of every stripe perceived the war, why they supported or opposed intervention, how they experienced the nightmarish reality of industrial warfare, and how the conflict changed American life. Richard Harding Davis witnesses the burning of Louvain; Edith Wharton tours the front in the Argonne and Flanders; John Reed reports from Serbia and Bukovina; Charles Lauriat describes the sinking of the Lusitania; Leslie Davis records the Armenian genocide; Jane Addams and Emma Goldman protest against militarism; Victor Chapman and Edmond Genet fly with the Lafayette Escadrille; Floyd Gibbons, Hervey Allen, and Edward Lukens experience the ferocity of combat in Belleau Wood, Fismette, and the Meuse-Argonne; and Ellen La Motte and Mary Borden unflinchingly examine the "human wreckage" brought into military hospitals. W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Claude McKay protest the racist treatment of black soldiers and the violence directed at African Americans on the home front; Carrie Chapman Catt connects the war with the fight for women suffrage; Willa Cather explores the impact of the war on rural Nebraska; Henry May recounts a deadly influenza outbreak onboard a troop transport; Oliver Wendell Holmes weighs the limits of free speech in wartime; Woodrow Wilson envisions a world without war. A coda presents three iconic literary works by Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos. With an introduction and headnotes by A. Scott Berg, brief biographies of the writers, and endpaper maps. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
In 1914 America was determined to stay clear of Europe's war. By 1917, the country was ready to lunge into the fray. The Path to War tells the full story of what happened.
Interweaving personal stories with historical photos and background, this lively account documents the history of the more than 40,000 women who served in relief and military duty during World War I. Through personal interviews and excerpts from diaries, letters, and memoirs, Lettie Gavin relates poignant stories of women's wartime experiences and provides a unique perspective on their progress in military service. American Women in World War I captures the spirit of these determined patriots and their times for every reader and will be of special interest to military, women's, and social historians.
The riveting true story of America's first modern military battle, its first military victory during World War One, and its first steps onto the world stage At first light on Tuesday, May 28th, 1918, waves of American riflemen from the U.S. Army's 1st Division climbed from their trenches, charged across the shell-scarred French dirt of no-man's-land, and captured the hilltop village of Cantigny from the grip of the German Army. Those who survived the enemy machine-gun fire and hand-to-hand fighting held on for the next two days and nights in shallow foxholes under the sting of mustard gas and crushing steel of artillery fire. Thirteen months after the United States entered World War I, these 3,500 soldiers became the first "doughboys" to enter the fight. The operation, the first American attack ever supported by tanks, airplanes, and modern artillery, was ordered by the leader of America's forces in Europe, General John "Black Jack" Pershing, and planned by a young staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel George C. Marshall, who would fill the lead role in World War II twenty-six years later. Drawing on the letters, diaries, and reports by the men themselves, Matthew J. Davenport's First Over There tells the inspiring, untold story of these soldiers and their journey to victory on the Western Front in the Battle of Cantigny. The first American battle of the "war to end all wars" would mark not only its first victory abroad, but the birth of its modern Army.
