Jennifer D. Keene Knihy

Now in its second edition, The United States and the First World War draws on the most recent scholarship to examine the significance of World War I in American history. Written in a lively style that brings the era and historical actors alive, this concise and accessible text give students the resources they need to grapple with the important question of how the conflict revolutionized the American way of war in the 20th century. It examines the causes of the war, mobilization of the Homefront and key social reforms of time, as well as military strategy, the experiences of soldiers and the Versailles Peace Treaty. Jennifer D. Keene touches on social reform and social justice movements that were energized by the war, such as female suffragists, temperance advocates, African Americans, and Progressives pressing to make America safe for democracy. This new edition includes an expanded discussion of humanitarianism, the African American experience, and the impact of the influenza pandemic of 1918-19. New primary documents and four detailed maps provide students with additional context for this pivotal time in history. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of modern American history, American military history, and U.S. Foreign Relations.

How does a democratic government conscript citizens, turn them into soldiers who can fight effectively against a highly trained enemy, and then somehow reward these troops for their service? In Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, Jennifer D. Keene argues that the doughboy experience in 1917–18 forged the U.S. Army of the twentieth century and ultimately led to the most sweeping piece of social-welfare legislation in the nation's history―the G.I. Bill. Keene shows how citizen-soldiers established standards of discipline that the army in a sense had to adopt. Even after these troops had returned to civilian life, lessons learned by the army during its first experience with a mass conscripted force continued to influence the military as an institution. The experience of going into uniform and fighting abroad politicized citizen-soldiers, Keene finally argues, in ways she asks us to ponder. She finds that the country and the conscripts―in their view―entered into a certain social compact, one that assured veterans that the federal government owed conscripted soldiers of the twentieth century debts far in excess of the pensions the Grand Army of the Republic had claimed in the late nineteenth century.