Duty Calls at Home: Central Pennsylvania Responds to the Great War, 1914–1918 ed. by Steven Burg et al. (review)

Over there. … The Yanks are coming. So prepare. Say a prayer. We'll be over. We're coming over. And we won't come back till it's over. Over there.

American composer George M. Cohan, "the man who owned Broadway," put those words to music in 1917. They helped inspire Americans to support their nation's entry into the Great War, an act framed by their leaders as one that would make the world safe for democracy. Central Pennsylvanians embraced their nation's cause. The essays collected in Duty Calls at Home: Central Pennsylvania Responds to the Great War, 1914–1918 renders this vividly. They demonstrate how "fully the Great War permeated the fabric of daily life in Central Pennsylvania" (viii).

This constitutes a valuable service. One hundred years ago the Great War consumed America's attention. Now it barely registers. The grand purpose ascribed to it by America's leaders failed to materialize. It did not prove to be the war to end all wars. A second great war soon erupted.

America's increased role in World War II, its centrality in the ensuing Cold War, along with the passage of time, enabled later conflicts to eclipse the place of the Great War, renamed World War I, in the nation's collective memory. Yet the effects of the Great War linger, discernible in many of America's foreign engagements that followed, including the ongoing Global War on Terror. Perhaps most notably, World War I began the process of blurring the distinction between "over there" and "over here."

Duty Calls at Home enables readers to "better understand the difficult and often overlooked moment in the history of Central Pennsylvania" (266). Its focus is on the home front. This is surprisingly unique. There exists no standard history here, only a section in Randall Miller and William Pencak's Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002).

This collection represents the first concerted effort at producing "social and cultural histories" about the war's impact on the lives of "everyday people and communities," largely in the Cumberland Valley but extending in geographical reach to Gettysburg, Harrisburg, Mercersburg, and West Chester (vi). The essays make good use of primary source materials located in archives, libraries, and historical societies. They are particularly adept at drawing from local newspapers from the time.

Graduate students authored the essays as part of a class project that originated in History 602: Research in Local and Regional History offered at Shippensburg University in the spring of 2013. Hopefully they all received high marks in the class from its instructor, Shippensburg professor Steven Burg, who contributes the afterword to this volume.

Burg's essay powerfully concludes the work by exploring the war's impact on the town of Shippensburg through the story of its first casualty, twenty-one-year-old William Cloyd Ashwell, a victim of spinal meningitis contracted on active duty in Europe. It calls attention to a monument to Ashwell in Shippensburg Spring Hill Cemetery that over time came to serve as a "tribute to all of the community's veterans from all of the nation's wars" (265).

This fittingly concludes a collection that demonstrates well how the present appropriates the past. And how the past informs the present. In "The Boys Are Called: Popular Response to the World War I Mobilization of the Pennsylvania National Guard," John Maietta chronicles the public perception of the National Guard from its 1916 deployment to the Mexican border through its mobilization for the Great War in Carlisle and Harrisburg. He juxtaposes the enthusiastic embrace the Guard received in 1917 to the recent "emotional ceremonies" convened for Guard units serving in Afghanistan and Iraq (6).

Connecting the past and present emerge as a strength...