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Description
"World War I has occupied an uneasy place in the American public and political consciousness.1 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, World War I failed to find a stable place in the national narrative."
ISBN
978-1-78920-454-4
Publication Date
2021
Publisher
Berghahn Books
City
New York, NY
Disciplines
Cultural History | European History | Military History | Oral History | Other History | Political History | Public History | Social History | United States History
Recommended Citation
Keene, Jennifer D. "Finding a Place for World War I in American History 1914-1918." In Writing the Great War: The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present, edited by Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich, 449-487. New York: Berghahn Books, 2021.
Copyright
Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Included in
Cultural History Commons, European History Commons, Military History Commons, Oral History Commons, Other History Commons, Political History Commons, Public History Commons, Social History Commons, United States History Commons
Comments
In Christoph Cornelissen and Arndt Weinrich (Eds.), Writing the Great War: The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present.