Download or read book World War I and America Told By the Americans Who Lived It LOA 289 written by A. Scott Berg and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book America and the Great War written by Margaret E. Wagner and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Titles of the Year for 2017 "A uniquely colorful chronicle of this dramatic and convulsive chapter in American--and world--history. It's an epic tale, and here it is wondrously well told." --David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of FREEDOM FROM FEAR From August 1914 through March 1917, Americans were increasingly horrified at the unprecedented destruction of the First World War. While sending massive assistance to the conflict's victims, most Americans opposed direct involvement. Their country was immersed in its own internal struggles, including attempts to curb the power of business monopolies, reform labor practices, secure proper treatment for millions of recent immigrants, and expand American democracy. Yet from the first, the war deeply affected American emotions and the nation's commercial, financial, and political interests. The menace from German U-boats and failure of U.S. attempts at mediation finally led to a declaration of war, signed by President Wilson on April 6, 1917. America and the Great War commemorates the centennial of that turning point in American history. Chronicling the United States in neutrality and in conflict, it presents events and arguments, political and military battles, bitter tragedies and epic achievements that marked U.S. involvement in the first modern war. Drawing on the matchless resources of the Library of Congress, the book includes many eyewitness accounts and more than 250 color and black-and-white images, many never before published. With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David M. Kennedy, America and the Great War brings to life the tempestuous era from which the United States emerged as a major world power.

Download or read book The Great War in America World War I and Its Aftermath written by Garrett Peck and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chronicle of the American experience during World War I and the unexpected changes that rocked the country in its immediate aftermath—the Red Scare, race riots, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition. 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 World War I's centennial. The U.S. had steered clear of the European conflagration known as 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. Though overshadowed by the tens of millions of deaths and catastrophic destruction of World War II, the Great War was the most important war of the twentieth century. It was the first continent-wide conflagration in a century, and it drew much of the world into its fire. By the end of it, 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 Great War is often overlooked, especially compared to World War II, which is considered the “last good war.” 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.

Download or read book America in the Great War written by Ronald Schaffer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1994-04-28 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After such conflicts as World War II, Vietnam, and now the Persian Gulf, the First World War seems a distant, almost ancient event. It conjures up images of trenches, horse-drawn wagons, and old-fashioned wide-brimmed helmets--a conflict closer to the Civil War than to our own time. It hardly seems an American war at all, considering we fought for scarcely over a year in a primarily European struggle. But, as Ronald Schaffer recounts in this fascinating new book, the Great War wrought a dramatic revolution in America, wrenching a diverse, unregulated, nineteenth-century society into the modern age. Ranging from the Oval Office to corporate boardroom, from the farmyard to the battlefield, America in the Great War details a nation reshaped by the demands of total war. Schaffer shows how the Wilson Administration used persuasion, manipulation, direct control, and the cooperation of private industries and organizations to mobilize a freewheeling, individualist country. The result was a war-welfare state, imposing the federal government on almost every aspect of American life. He describes how it spread propaganda, enforced censorship, and stifled dissent. Political radicals, religious pacifists, German-Americans, even average people who voiced honest doubts about the war suffered arrest and imprisonment. The government extended its control over most of the nation's economic life through a series of new agencies--largely filled with managers from private business, who used their new positions to eliminate competition and secure other personal and corporate gains. Schaffer also details the efforts of scholars, scientists, workers, women, African- Americans, and of social, medical, and moral reformers, to use the war to advance their own agendas even as they contributed to the drive for victory. And not the least important is his account of how soldiers reacted to the reality of war--both at the front lines and at the rear--revealing what brought the doughboys to the battlefield, and how they went through not only horror and disillusionment but felt a fervent patriotism as well. Some of the upheavals Schaffer describes were fleeting--as seen in the thousands of women who had to leave their wartime jobs when the boys came home--but others meant permanent change and set precedents for such future programs as the New Deal. By showing how American life would never be the same again after the Armistice, America in the Great War lays a new foundation for understanding both the First World War and twentieth-century America.

Download or read book How America Won World War I written by Alan Axelrod and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-09-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The South and America Since World War II written by James Charles Cobb and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this sweeping narrative, Cobb covers such diverse topics as "Dixiecrats," the "southern strategy," the South's domination of today's GOP, immigration, the national ascendance of southern culture and music, and the roles of women and an increasingly visible gay population in contemporary southern life. Beginning with the early stages of the civil rights struggle, Cobb discusses how the attack on Pearl Harbor set the stage for the demise of Jim Crow. He examines the NAACP's postwar assault on the South's racial system, the famous bus boycott in Montgomery, the emergence of Rev. Martin Luther King in the movement, and the dramatic protests and confrontations that finally brought profound racial changes, and two-party politics to the South.

Download or read book Threshold of War written by Waldo Heinrichs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990-03-01 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first comprehensive treatment of the American entry into World War II to appear in over thirty-five years, Waldo Heinrichs' volume places American policy in a global context, covering both the European and Asian diplomatic and military scenes, with Roosevelt at the center. Telling a tale of ever-broadening conflict, this vivid narrative weaves back and forth from the battlefields in the Soviet Union, to the intense policy debates within Roosevelt's administration, to the sinking of the battleship Bismarck, to the precarious and delicate negotiations with Japan. Refuting the popular portrayal of Roosevelt as a vacillating, impulsive man who displayed no organizational skills in his decision-making during this period, Heinrichs presents him as a leader who acted with extreme caution and deliberation, who always kept his options open, and who, once Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union stalled in July, 1941, acted rapidly and with great determination. This masterful account of a key moment in American history captures the tension faced by Roosevelt, Churchill, Stimson, Hull, and numerous others as they struggled to shape American policy in the climactic nine months before Pearl Harbor.

Download or read book A Call to Arms written by Maury Klein and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-07-16 with total page 916 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The colossal scale of World War II required a mobilization effort greater than anything attempted in all of the world's history. The United States had to fight a war across two oceans and three continents--and to do so, it had to build and equip a military that was all but nonexistent before the war began. Never in the nation's history did it have to create, outfit, transport, and supply huge armies, navies, and air forces on so many distant and disparate fronts. The Axis powers might have fielded better-trained soldiers, better weapons, and better tanks and aircraft, but they could not match American productivity. The United States buried its enemies in aircraft, ships, tanks, and guns; in this sense, American industry and American workers, won World War II. The scale of the effort was titanic, and the result historic. Not only did it determine the outcome of the war, but it transformed the American economy and society. Maury Klein's A Call to Arms is the definitive narrative history of this epic struggle--told by one of America's greatest historians of business and economics--and renders the transformation of America with a depth and vividness never available before.

Download or read book Nothing Less Than War written by Justus D. Doenecke and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2011-03-08 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When war broke out in Europe in 1914, political leaders in the United States were swayed by popular opinion to remain neutral; yet less than three years later, the nation declared war on Germany. In Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America's Entry into World War I, Justus D. Doenecke examines the clash of opinions over the war during this transformative period and offers a fresh perspective on America's decision to enter World War I. Doenecke reappraises the public and private diplomacy of President Woodrow Wilson and his closest advisors and explores in great depth the response of Congress to the war. He also investigates the debates that raged in the popular media and among citizen groups that sprang up across the country as the U.S. economy was threatened by European blockades and as Americans died on ships sunk by German U-boats. The decision to engage in battle ultimately belonged to Wilson, but as Doenecke demonstrates, Wilson's choice was not made in isolation. Nothing Less Than War provides a comprehensive examination of America's internal political climate and its changing international role during the seminal period of 1914--1917.

Download or read book The World Remade written by G. J. Meyer and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2017-03-07 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bracing, indispensable account of America’s epoch-defining involvement in the Great War, rich with fresh insights into the key issues, events, and personalities of the period After years of bitter debate, the United States declared war on Imperial Germany on April 6, 1917, plunging the country into the savage European conflict that would redraw the map of the continent—and the globe. The World Remade is an engrossing chronicle of America’s pivotal, still controversial intervention into World War I, encompassing the tumultuous politics and towering historical figures that defined the era and forged the future. When it declared war, the United States was the youngest of the major powers and militarily the weakest by far. On November 11, 1918, when the fighting stopped, it was not only the richest country on earth but the mightiest. With the mercurial, autocratic President Woodrow Wilson as a primary focus, G. J. Meyer takes readers from the heated deliberations over U.S. involvement, through the provocations and manipulations that drew us into the fight, to the battlefield itself and the shattering aftermath of the struggle. America’s entry into the Great War helped make possible the defeat of Germany that had eluded Britain, France, Russia, and Italy in three and a half years of horrendous carnage. Victory, in turn, led to a peace treaty so ill-conceived, so vindictive, that the world was put on the road to an even bloodier confrontation a mere twenty years later. On the home front, Meyer recounts the break-up of traditional class structures, the rise of the progressive and labor movements, the wave of anti-German hysteria, and the explosive expansion of both the economy and federal power, including shocking suspensions of constitutional protections that planted the seeds of today’s national security state. Here also are revealing portraits of Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert La Follette, Eugene Debs, and John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, among others, as well as European leaders such as “Welsh Wizard” David Lloyd George of Britain, “Tiger” Georges Clemenceau of France, and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Meyer interweaves the many strands of his story into a gripping narrative that casts new light on one of the darkest, most forgotten corners of U.S. history. In the grand tradition of his earlier work A World Undone—which centered on the European perspective—The World Remade adds a new, uniquely American dimension to our understanding of the seminal conflict of the twentieth century. Praise for The World Remade “[G. J.] Meyer offers wonderful insights into many of the key players in this arresting saga . . . one that should be read to understand our emergence as a global power.”—Booklist (starred review) “Meyer gives a good sense of America’s future at that negotiating table and Wilson’s celebrated role at Versailles as the leader of the free world. . . . A refreshing look at this still-much-debated world debacle.”—Kirkus Reviews “Characters come alive and the past seems near. . . . Meyer succeeds brilliantly with his basic narrative approach, and any reader who wants to learn about American participation in the war will benefit from this book.”—Publishers Weekly “This book is well written, sharp, and has bearing on our present and future involvement in wars. A+”—Seattle Book Review “This lengthy revisionist history will fit well with American history and governmental studies departments in both public and academic libraries.”—Library Journal

Download or read book America in Our Time written by Godfrey Hodgson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a new afterword by the author

Download or read book Latin America and the First World War written by Stefan Rinke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-13 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive study of Latin America during the First World War from a transnational perspective.

Download or read book Come On In America written by Linda Barrett Osborne and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A wide-ranging exploration of World War I and how it changed the United States forever” with photos, illustrations, and maps that bring history to life (Kirkus Reviews). On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and joined World War I. German submarine attacks on American ships in March 1917 were the overt motive for declaring war, but the underlying reasons were far more complex. Even after the United States officially joined, Americans were divided on whether they should be a part of it. Americans were told they were fighting a war for democracy, but with racial segregation rampant in the United States, new laws against dissent and espionage being passed, and bankers and industrial leaders gaining increased influence and power, what did democracy mean? Come On In, America explores not only how and why the United States joined World War I, but also the events—at home and overseas—that changed the course of American history. “Effectively juxtaposes issues such as censorship, propaganda, prejudice, discrimination, and violence that arose in the United States against the democratic ideals for which U.S. troops went to war...an informative book.” ?School Library Journal

Download or read book Small Town America in World War II written by Ronald E. Marcello and published by University of North Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historians acknowledge that World War II touched every man, woman, and child in the United States. In Small Town America in World War II, Ronald E. Marcello uses oral history interviews with civilians and veterans to explore how the citizens of Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, responded to the war effort. Located along the western shore of the Susquehanna River in York County, Wrightsville was a transportation hub with various shops, stores, and services as well as industrial plants. Interviews with citizens and veterans are organized in sections on the home front; the North African-Italian, European, and Pacific theatres; stateside military service; and occupation in Germany. Throughout Marcello provides introductions and contextual narrative on World War II as well as annotations for events and military terms. Overseas the citizens of Wrightsville turned into soldiers. An infantryman in the Italian campaign, Alfred Forry, explained, “I was forty-five days on the line wearing the same clothes, but everybody was in the same situation, so you didn’t mind the stench and body odors.” A veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, Edward Reisinger, remembered, “Replacements had little chance of surviving. They were sent to the front one day, and the next day they were coming back with mattress covers over them. The sergeants never knew the names of these people.” Mortar man Donald Peters described the death of a buddy who was hit by artillery shrapnel: “His arm was just hanging on by the skin, and his intestines were hanging out.” In the conclusion Marcello examines how the war affected Wrightsville. Did the war bring a return to prosperity? What effects did it have on women? How did wartime trauma affect the returning veterans? In short, did World War II transform Wrightsville and its citizens, or was it the same town after the war?

Download or read book Looking for the Good War written by Elizabeth D. Samet and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-11-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A remarkable book, from its title and subtitle to its last words . . . A stirring indictment of American sentimentality about war.” —Robert G. Kaiser, The Washington Post In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. Samet finds the war's ambivalent legacy in some of its most heavily mythologized figures: the war correspondent epitomized by Ernie Pyle, the character of the erstwhile G.I. turned either cop or criminal in the pulp fiction and feature films of the late 1940s, the disaffected Civil War veteran who looms so large on the screen in the Cold War Western, and the resurgent military hero of the post-Vietnam period. Taken together, these figures reveal key elements of postwar attitudes toward violence, liberty, and nation—attitudes that have shaped domestic and foreign policy and that respond in various ways to various assumptions about national identity and purpose established or affirmed by World War II. As the United States reassesses its roles in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the time has come to rethink our national mythology: the way that World War II shaped our sense of national destiny, our beliefs about the use of American military force throughout the world, and our inability to accept the realities of the twenty-first century’s decades of devastating conflict.

Download or read book America s Great War written by Robert Zieger and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2001-11-13 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent bestsellers by Niall Ferguson and John Keegan have created tremendous popular interest in World War I. In America's Great War prominent historian Robert H. Zieger examines the causes, prosecution, and legacy of this bloody conflict from a frequently overlooked perspective, that of American involvement. This is the first book to illuminate both America's dramatic influence on the war and the war's considerable impact upon our nation. Zieger's engaging narrative provides vivid descriptions of the famous battles and diplomatic maneuvering, while also chronicling America's rise to prominence within the postwar world. On the domestic front, Zieger details how the war forever altered American politics and society by creating the National Security State, generating powerful new instruments of social control, bringing about innovative labor and social welfare programs, and redefining civil liberties and race relations. America's Great War promises to become the definitive history of America and World War I.

Download or read book The United States in World War II written by Mark Stoler and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-15 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Outstanding . . . the best short history I have read of America’s role in World War II. Stoler and Michelmore draw on a judicious selection of historical documents to provide a concise, readable history. The historiography of the war is well covered and explained. It is no small task to delineate the many, sometimes, heated debates over the conduct of the war, and in this volume the many sides of the historical debate are fairly and evenly treated. For a single-volume study, the book is remarkably comprehensive. It addresses major events and decisions; yet it also covers the political and policy-driven, strategic and operational, and social and cultural aspects of the War. The development of key technologies (such as the atomic bomb) and intelligence capabilities are explained. Finally, this book also covers topics that are often neglected in histories of the War, including racism in America, the American response to the Holocaust, and the evolving role of women in the workforce." —Adrian Lewis, The University of Kansas, author of The American Culture of War: The History of U.S. Military Forces from World War II to Operation Enduring Freedom (Routledge, 2nd ed. 2012)