Jennifer D. Keene

Remembering the “Forgotten War”: American Historiography on World War I

WORLD WAR I has occupied an uneasy place in the American public and political consciousness. In the 1920s and 1930s, controversies over the war permeated the nation’s cultural and political life, influencing memorial culture and governmental policy. Interest in the war, however, waned considerably after World War II, a much larger and longer war for the United States. Despite a plethora of scholarly works examining nearly every aspect of the war, interest in the war remains limited even among academic historians. In many respects World War I became the “forgotten war” because Americans never developed a unifying collective memory about its meaning or the political lessons it offered. Americans remembered the Civil War as the war that ended slavery and saved the union, World War II as “the good war” that eliminated fascist threats in Europe and the Pacific, the Cold War as a struggle for survival against a communist foe, and Vietnam as an unpopular war. By comparison, the First World War failed to find a stable place in the national narrative.

Finding Common Ground

Representing the best of cutting-edge scholarship in First World War studies, this anthology demonstrates how conversations among historians across international and cross-disciplinary boundaries enhances our understanding of this global conflict.

American pandemic: the lost worlds of the 1918 influenza epidemic

American national identity rests on a triumphant narrative of unifying to overcome adversity and emerging stronger as a result. According to Nancy K. Bristow, this phenomenon also explains why Amer...