World War I and America: Told By the Americans Who Lived It (LOA #289)

A landmark anthology of World War I history featuring 127 selections from over 80 Americans—including soldiers, airmen, nurses, and more—who experienced the cataclysmic conflict first-hand. 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 88 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. Among the writers: war correspondent Richard Harding Davis witnesses the burning of Louvain; Edith Wharton tours the war zones in the Argonne and Flanders; John Reed records the devastation in Serbia and Galicia; diplomats Henry Morgenthau and Leslie Davis report on the extermination of the Armenians; Jane Addams and Emma Goldman warn against militarism; pilots Victor Chapman and Edmond Genet describe flying with the Lafayette Escadrille; infantry officer Hervey Allen recalls the hellish fighting at Fismette; nurses Ellen N. La Motte and Mary Borden depict the “human wreckage” brought into military hospitals; suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt connects the war with the struggle for women’s rights; and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes considers the limits of free speech in wartime. W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Jessie Redmon Fauset expose the contradiction between the nation’s claim to be fighting for democracy abroad and its brutal treatment of African Americans at home. The international role of the United States is debated in strikingly contemporary terms by Wilson and his critics, as the nation grapples with its emergence as a leading world power. A coda presents three iconic literary works by Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos that capture the postwar disillusionment felt by many Americans. Includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, and an index.