During World War I, the first American war in which women were mobilized on a mass scale by the armed services, more than sixteen thousand women served overseas with the American Expeditionary Force. Although wealthy women volunteers—members of the so-called'heiress corps'—monopolized public attention, Susan Zeiger reveals that the majority of AEF women were wage-earners. Their motives for enlistment ranged from patriotism to economic self-interest, from a sense of adventure to a desire to challenge gender boundaries. Zeiger uses diaries, letters, questionnaires, oral histories, and memoirs to explore the women's experience of war. She draws upon insights from labor history, political history, popular culture, and the study of gender and war to analyze the ways in which women's wartime service heightened and made visible the contradictions in the prevailing gender relations. Zeiger argues that the interests of AEF women clashed with those of the wartime state at a crucial historical moment. Women sought to expand their personal opportunities for mobility and professional success and lay claim to equal citizenship. The government, determined to contain the disruption to the status quo, created a separate, subordinate status for women in the military,'domesticating'women's service and reinscribing it within conventional limits.

This captivating collection of first-hand accounts brings to life the "War to End All Wars." Personal Perspectives: World War I offers a unique and unprecedented view of the Great War through the experiences of its participants—people of all ranks and races. Focusing on 12 major groups, essays by top international scholars put readers directly into the lives of victims of gas attacks, women factory workers, African American soldiers, pacifists, medical personnel, and other groups both on the battlefield and home front. Of interest to both students and nonexperts, the work tells the stories of soldiers who suffered in the trenches, U-boat and anti–U-boat personnel, German Americans in the United States, and women activists like Florence Jaffrey Harriman. Through the perspectives of commanders, captives, civilians, and social workers, readers will learn why British soldiers in the Netherlands were called "maiden robbers," how the YMCA set up huts to care for prisoners in POW camps, and how efforts to entertain U.S. troops led to the the largest theatrical enterprise in history.

With the centennial of the First World War rapidly approaching, historian and bibliographer James T. Controvich offers in The United States in World War I: A Bibliographic Guide the most comprehensive, up-to-date reference bibliography yet published. Organized by subject, this bibliography includes the full range of sources: vintage publications of the time, books, pamphlets, periodical titles, theses, dissertations, and archival sources held by federal and state organizations, as well as those in public and private hands, including historical societies and museums. As Controvich’s bibliographic accounting makes clear, there were many facets of World War I that remain virtually unknown to this day. Throughout, Controvich’s bibliography tracks the primary sources that tell each of these stories—and many others besides—during this tense period in American history. Each entry lists the author, title, place of publication, publisher, date of publication, and page count as well as descriptive information concerning illustrations, plates, ports, maps, diagrams, and plans. The armed forces section carries additional information on rosters, awards, citations, and killed and wounded in action lists. The United States in World War I: A Bibliographic Guide is an ideal research tool for students and scholars of World War I and American history.

This book provides the first sustained study of women's literary representations of death and the culture of war commemoration that underlies British and American literary modernism.

The iconic relief organization’s activities over a half century of history, through wars, epidemics, and other disasters: “Well-researched . . . fascinating.” —Julia F. Irwin, Bulletin of the History of Medicine In dark skirts and bloodied boots, Clara Barton fearlessly ventured onto Civil War battlefields to tend to wounded soldiers. She later worked with civilians in Europe during the Franco-Prussian War, lobbied legislators to ratify the Geneva conventions, and founded and ran the American Red Cross. The American Red Cross from Clara Barton to the New Deal tells the story of the charitable organization from its start in 1881, through its humanitarian aid during wars, natural disasters, and the Depression, to its relief efforts of the 1930s. Marian Moser Jones illustrates the tension between the organization’s founding principles of humanity and neutrality and the political, economic, and moral pressures that sometimes caused it to favor one group at the expense of another. This book tells the stories of: • U.S. natural disasters such as the Jacksonville yellow fever epidemic of 1888, the Sea Islands hurricane of 1893, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake • crises abroad, including the 1892 Russian famine and the Armenian massacres of 1895–96 • efforts to help civilians affected by the civil war in Cuba • power struggles within the American Red Cross leadership and subsequent alliances with the American government • the organization’s expansion during World War I • race riots and massacres in East St. Louis, Chicago, and Tulsa between 1917 and 1921 • help for African American and white Southerners after the Mississippi flood of 1927 • relief projects during the Dust Bowl and after the New Deal An epilogue relates the history of the American Red Cross since the beginning of World War II and illuminates the organization’s current practices and international reputation.

World War I heralded a new global era of warfare, consolidating and expanding changes that had been building throughout the previous century, while also instituting new notions of war. The 1914-18 conflict witnessed the first aerial bombing of civilian populations, the first widespread concentration camps for the internment of enemy alien civilians, and an unprecedented use of civilian labor and resources for the war effort. Humanitarian relief programs for civilians became a common feature of modern society, while food became as significant as weaponry in the fight to win. Tammy M. Proctor argues that it was World War I—the first modern, global war—that witnessed the invention of both the modern “civilian” and the “home front,” where a totalizing war strategy pitted industrial nations and their citizenries against each other. Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918, explores the different ways civilians work and function in a war situation, and broadens our understanding of the civilian to encompass munitions workers, nurses, laundresses, refugees, aid workers, and children who lived and worked in occupied zones, on home and battle fronts, and in the spaces in between. Comprehensive and global in scope, spanning the Eastern, Western, Italian, East African, and Mediterranean fronts, Proctor examines in lucid and evocative detail the role of experts in the war, the use of forced labor, and the experiences of children in the combatant countries. As in many wars, civilians on both sides of WWI were affected, and vast displacements of the populations shaped the contemporary world in countless ways, redrawing boundaries and creating or reviving lines of ethnic conflict. Exploring primary source materials and secondary studies of combatant and neutral nations, while synthesizing French, German, Dutch, and English language sources, Proctor transcends the artificial boundaries of national histories and the exclusive focus on soldiers. Instead she tells the fascinating and long-buried story of the civilian in the Great War, allowing voices from the period to speak for themselves.

World War I propelled the United States into the twentieth century and served as a powerful catalyst for the making of modern California. The war expanded the role of the government and enlarged the presence of private citizens’ associations. Never before had so many Californians taken such a dynamic part in community, state, national, and international affairs. These definitive events unfold in California at War as a complex, richly detailed historical narrative. Historian Diane M. T. North not only writes about the transformative battlefield and nursing experiences of ordinary Californians, but also documents how daily life changed for everyone on the home front—factory and farm workers, housewives and children, pacifists and politicians. Even before the United States entered the war, California’s economy flourished because its industrialized agriculture helped feed British troops. The war provided a boost to the faltering Hollywood film industry and increased the military’s presence through the addition of Army and Navy training camps and air fields, ship construction, contracts to local businesses, coastal defenses, and university-sponsored scientific research. In these stories, North traces the roots of California’s global stature. The war united Californians in common humanitarian goals as they supported war-related charities, funded the nation’s war machine, conserved food, and enforced rationing. Most citizens embraced wartime restrictions with patriotic zeal and did not foresee the retreat into suspicion, loyalty oaths, and unwarranted surveillance, all of which set the stage for the beginnings of the modern security state. California at War raises important questions about what happens when a nation goes to war. This book illuminates the legacy of World War I for all Americans.