Reconsidering World War I
- Reconsidering World War I
On February 27, 2011, Frank Buckles, The Last American Veteran of World War I, died in West Virginia at the age of 110. He served as an ambulance driver in France in 1918, and with his death, the New York Times reported, we lost "the last living link to the two million men who served in the American Expeditionary Forces in France in 'the war to end all wars.'" Of course, the American involvement in the war came late, and the conflict's hold on the American imagination is dwarfed by its impact on the collective psyches of other belligerent powers.
As we approach the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, we can expect a great number of books exploring all aspects of the "Great War." Indeed, in recent months several important books have already appeared. For this issue of Historically Speaking, we asked four authors to share their views on World War I. We begin with Sean McMeekin, who advances the provocative revisionist thesis—developed in his new book The Russian Origins of the First World War (The Belnknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011)—that "the Ottoman angle" was "central to the war's origins, course, and consequences." Our next offering is an interview with Adam Hochschild, whose To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011) focuses on the battle in Britain between "those who felt the war was a noble and necessary crusade and those who felt it was absolute madness." Jeremy Black takes a very different approach. Drawing from his The Great War and the Making of the Modern World (Continuum, 2011), Black's essay takes aim at a number of the "conventional platitudes" that reflect "potent currents of sentimentality" more than "what actually happened." In the section's final essay Jennifer Keene, author of World War I: The American Soldier Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2011), questions the traditional narrative depicting "an ideal and enthusiastic America marching off to war and [then] suffering disillusionment when encountering the reality of fighting along the Western Front."
