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AMERICANS IN WORLD WAR I – WORLD WAR I IN AMERICA

Historians of the United States and World War I have noted that theirs is a “forgotten war,” with no firmly established place in American historical memory. World War I lingers in the shadows of the Civil War, World War II, and the Vietnam War, Jennifer Keene observes in a recent review essay, “because Americans never developed a unifying collective memory about its meaning or the political lessons it offered.”According to Keene, the war’s subordinate place in American historical consciousness is mirrored by the small number of “dedicated World War I historians” in the United States.2 But as her own essay bears out, historians have continued to produce a rich and diverse historiography. There are excellent overviews and syntheses, monographs and articles exploring U.S. diplomacy and military participation, not to mention scholarship devoted to the war’s impact on American social and cultural history.3 The war’s centennial, moreover, has prompted several major conferences and discussions on World War I, resulting in special issues of Diplomatic History and the Journal of American History.4 Although World War I continues to take a backseat in American public memory, research on this key twentieth-century period has lost no steam. While historians have continued to investigate the many dimensions of the United States in World War I, the centennial also has highlighted a shift in emphasis. Recent work reassesses the different roles Americans assumed during the war and, by implication, the relationship between American civil society and the federal state. This special issue of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era pays tribute to the ways in which historians today grapple with the history of the United States during World War I by providing different perspectives on some of the most salient developments in recent historical writing, from political to social to cultural history. Taken together, the essays in this issue represent the scope of historical investigation today, from refining topics with a long historiographic tradition to opening up new ones. While all of these approaches help advance our understanding of the war period, some of the essays in this issue emphasize a recent trend to inquire about the political implications of nonstate action. But let us take a step back. Americans have debated the war’s meaning for a century. Initially, the focus was very much on the role of the state. Between 1914 and 1917, Americans disagreed over President Woodrow Wilson’s pursuit of neutrality and, eventually, over their country’s entry into a war they knew entailed unprecedented carnage. As a The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 17 (2018), 599–607 doi:10.1017/S1537781418000257