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Americans today harbor no strong or consistent collective memory of the First World War. Ask why the country fought or what they accomplished, and "democracy" is the most likely if vague response. The circulation of confusing or lofty rationales for intervention began as soon as President Woodrow Wilson secured a war declaration in April 1917. Yet amid those shifting justifications, Love and Death in the Great War argues, was a more durable and resonant one: Americans would fight for home and family. Officials in the military and government, grasping this crucial reality, invested the war with personal meaning, as did popular culture. "Make your mother proud of you/And the Old Red White and Blue" went George Cohan's famous tune "Over There." Federal officials and their allies in public culture, in short, told the war story as a love story. Intervention came at a moment when arbiters of traditional home and family were regarded as under pressure from all sides: industrial work, women's employment, immigration, urban vice, woman suffrage, and the imagined threat of black sexual aggression. Alleged German crimes in France and Belgium seemed to further imperil women and children. War promised to restore convention, stabilize gender roles, and sharpen male character. Love and Death in the Great War tracks such ideas of redemptive war across public and private spaces, policy and implementation, home and front, popular culture and personal correspondence. In beautifully rendered prose, Andrew J. Huebner merges untold stories of ordinary men and women with a history of wartime culture. Studying the radiating impact of war alongside the management of public opinion, he recovers the conflict's emotional dimensions--its everyday rhythms, heartbreaking losses, soaring possibilities, and broken promises.
List of contents
- Note on Sources
- Prologue
- Chapter 1: Johnny Get Your Gun
- Chapter 2: Make Your Daddy Glad
- Chapter 3: Tell Your Sweetheart not to Pine
- Chapter 4: The Yanks are Coming
- Chapter 5: So Prepare, Say a Prayer
- Chapter 6: Yankee Doodle Do or Die
- Chapter 7: It's Over Over There
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Andrew J. Huebner is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama. He is the author of The Warrior Image: Soldiers in American Culture from the Second World War to the Vietnam Era.
Summary
Love and Death in the Great War merges the stories of several American families with analysis of wartime popular culture. It argues that family, in lived experience and as symbolic motivator, gave the war meaning, recovering the conflict's personal dimensions. But that narrative had undergone transformative challenges by war's end.
Additional text
Engrossing and poignant...With exceptional nuance and writerly grace, Huebner probes the war's affective history...By placing the family at the center of his study-while remaining ever
mindful of the intersections between cultural constructions of the home and those of race, ethnicity, class, and gender-Andrew Huebner makes an important and original contribution to First World War Studies. Dozens of new books on World War I have appeared since the start of the centennial period in 2014. Beautifully written and deeply moving, Love and Death in the Great War stands among the very best of them.
