The United States in the Great War A Historiography

Abstract

The subject of America's participation in World War I has generated a body of literature far too extensive for compre hensive treatment in an essay. This piece is particularly intended to provide some guidelines to English-language scholar ship less likely to be familiar to non-specialist readers. It correspondingly emphasizes works published recently, preferably in the last twenty five years. It focuses on monographs at the expense of general histories with some discus sion of the war. And it avoids as far as possible citing familiar autobiographies and memoirs. General Works The United States in the early twentieth century was a country in ferment. Industrializa tion, immigration, and urbanization were only the obvious manifestations of a "Great Trans formation" that set the American polity and the American people at odds with each other in new ways. John Whiteclay Chambers's, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890 1920 (1992), and David Kennedy's Over Here (1980) are the best scholarly surveys of a coun try at war with itself as well as the Central Powers. Briefer and more analytical, America's Great War (2000), by Ralph H. Zieger, sees the conflict as the defining event of American history in the twenti eth century. Meirion and Susie Harries offer a general audience narrative ofthe home front in The Last Days of Innocence (1997). Byron FarwelPs narrative, Over There: The United States in the Great War, 1917-1918 (1999), incorporates previously over looked groups?blacks and women in particular. Among older studies, Arthur S. Link's Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (1954) was a part ofthe midcentury New American Nation series, and remains a useful comprehensive analysis. Tim Nenninger's essay in Against All Enemies (edited by Kenneth J. Hagan and William R. Roberts, 1986), "American Military Effectiveness in World War I," remains the best discussion of that controversial subject. The Germans, who were in a position to know, gave the United States a solid "B", according to Gregory Martin in "Ger man Strategy and German Assessments of the American Expedi tionary Force" in War and History. Among reference works, Anne Cipriano Venzon's The United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia (1995) stands out for the range and quality of its entries. Chambers's Oxford Companion to American Military History (1999) has a number of specific entries, and features a superb essay on the United States role in the war, jointly written by several lead ing scholars. Holger H. Herwig and Neil Heyman's biographical dictionary (1982) is useful for major military and political figures. The official seventeen-volume The UnitedStates Army in the World War, published by the United States Department of the Army in 1948, and the corresponding four-volume official history ofthe Air Service, The United States Air Force in WW1 (1978), are mines of primary source ma terial, reports and documents. These two works are also widely available in public libraries. The massive edition of Wilson's papers edited by Art...