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.

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.

Records the military, political, social, and cultural history of the Civil War through photographs, artifacts, period illustrations, maps, essays by historians, and firsthand accounts.

Appendices include laws and legislation concerning the Army Medical Department. Maps include those of territories and frontiers and Continental Army hospital locations. Illustrations are chiefly portraits.

On 21 March 1918 Germany initiated one of the most ferocious and offensives of the First World War. During the so-called Kaiserschlacht, German troops advanced on allied positions in a series of ferocious attacks which caused massive casualties, separated British and French forces and drove the British back towards the Channel ports. Five days later, as the German advance continued, one of the most dramatic summits of the war took place in Doullens. The outcome was to have extraordinary consequences. For the first time an allied supreme commander – the French General Foch – was appointed to command all the allied armies, while the statesmen realized that unity of purpose rather than national interest was ultimately the key to success. Within a few months a policy of defence became one of offence, and paved the way for British success at Amiens and the series of unbroken British victories that led Germany to plea for armistice. Victory in November 1918 was a matter for celebration; what was excised from history was how close Britain was to ignominious defeat just eight months earlier.

Military government on Okinawa from the first stages of planning until the transition toward a civil administration.