The early 20th century saw the founding of the National Security League, a nationalistic nonprofit organization committed to an expanded military, conscripted service, and meritocracy. This book details its history, from its formation in December 1914 through 1922, at which point it was a spent force in decline. Founded by wealthy corporate lawyers based in New York City, it had secret backers in the capitalist class, who had two goals in mind. One was to profit immensely from the newly begun World War I. The other was to control the working classes in times of both war and peace. This agenda was presented to the public under the guise of preparedness, patriotism, and Americanization. Although eventually convicted by Congress of having violated election spending limits no sanctions of any kind were ever applied. This history details the secret machinations of an organization dedicated to solidifying the grip of the capitalist class over workers, all undercover of American pride.

An advertisement in the sheet music of the song "Goodbye Broadway, Hello France" (1917) announces: "Music will help win the war!" This ad hits upon an American sentiment expressed not just in advertising, but heard from other sectors of society during the American engagement in the First World War. It was an idea both imagined and practiced, from military culture to sheet music writers, about the power of music to help create a strong military and national community in the face of the conflict; it appears straightforward. Nevertheless, the published sheet music, in addition to discourse about gender, soldiering and music, evince a more complex picture of society. This book presents a study of sheet music and military singing practices in America during the First World War that critically situates them in the social discourses, including issues of segregation and suffrage, and the historical context of the war. The transfer of musical styles between the civilian and military realm was fluid because so many men were enlisted from homes with the sheet music while they were also singing songs in their military training. Close musical analysis brings the meaningful musical and lyrical expressions of this time period to the forefront of our understanding of soldier and civilian music making at this time.

This evocative and wide-ranging set of articles is a forceful demonstration of how much the experience of East-Central and Eastern Europe, largely neglected until now, needs to be integrated into evolving scholarship on the era of the world wars. The collection diagnoses the challenge of achieving an enlarged historical and artistic perspective, and then goes on to meet it. Themes that are universal (exile, loss, trauma, survival, memory) and the undying subjects of art and artistic efforts at representation, here find specific expression. The case of Lithuania and its diverse populations is revealed in its full significance for a modern European history of the impact of the age of the world wars.

The Great War was a turning point of the twentieth century, giving birth to a new, modern, and industrial approach to warfare that changed the world forever. The remembrance, awareness, and knowledge of the conflict and, most importantly, of those who participated and were affected by it, altered from country to country, and in some cases has been almost entirely forgotten. New research strategies have emerged to help broaden our understanding of the First World War. Multidisciplinary approaches have been applied to material culture and conflict landscapes, from archive sources analysis and aerial photography to remote sensing, GIS and field research. Working within the context of a material and archival understanding of war, this book combines papers from different study fields that present interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches towards researching the First World War and its legacies, with particular concentration on the central and eastern European theatres of war.

In 1915, at the height of World War I, the Central Powers sent a secret mission, led by Oskar Ritter von Niedermayer and Werner Otto von Hentig, to the court of the emir of Afghanistan, Habibullah Khan. Jointly operated by the governments of Germany and Turkey, the purpose of the mission was to persuade the emir to declare full independence from the British Empire, enter the war on the side of the Central Powers and attack British India. The ultimate aim was part of Hindu-German conspiracy to provoke a nationalist revolution in India which would undermine British power in the region. Britain saw this mission as a serious and credible threat - so much so that they tried to intercept the travellers in Persia, en route from Istanbul to Kabul and subsequently deployed their own intelligence and diplomatic strategies to ensure that Afghanistan would retain its neutral position. Although the Hentig-Niedermayer expedition was ultimately unsuccessful, it had lasting consequences and served as a sign of the continuing German infatuation with the Middle East and Central Asia, which had begun under Bismarck and continued through the interwar period, until World War II. Written in a narrative style, this book provides a gripping account of the expedition, highlighting a previously little-known aspect of World War I.

Although the United States did not enter the First World War until April 1917, Canada enlisted the moment Great Britain engaged in the conflict in August 1914. The Canadian contribution was great, as more than 600,000 men and women served in the war effort 400,000 of them overseas out of a population of 8 million. More than 150,000 were wounded and nearly 67,000 gave their lives. The war was a pivotal turning point in the history of the modern world, and its mindless slaughter shattered a generation and destroyed seemingly secure values. The literature that the First World War generated, and continues to generate so many years later, is enormous and addresses a multitude of cultural and social matters in the history of Canada and the war itself. Although many scholars have brilliantly analyzed the literature of the war, little has been done to catalog the writings of ordinary participants: men and women who served in the war and wrote about it but are not included among well-known poets, novelists, and memoirists. Indeed, we don t even know how many titles these people published, nor do we know how many more titles were added later by relatives who considered the recollections or collected letters worthy of publication. Brian Douglas Tennyson s The Canadian Experience of the Great War: A Guide to Memoirs is the first attempt to identify all of the published accounts of First World War experiences by Canadian veterans."

During the last few decades there has been a growing recognition of the great role that remembering and collective memory play in forming the historical awareness. In addition, the dominant national form of history writing also met some challenges on the side of a transnational approach to the past. In A Nation Divided by History and Memory, a prominent Hungarian historian sheds light on how Hungary's historical image has become split as a consequence of the differences between the historian's conceptualisation of national history and its diverse representations in personal and collective memory. The book focuses on the shocking experiences and the intense memorial reactions generated by a few key historical events and the way in which they have been interpreted by the historical scholarship. The argument of A Nation Divided by History and Memory is placed into the context of an international historical discourse. This pioneering work is essential and enlightening reading for all historians, many sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists and university students.

In World War I and the Origins of U.S. Military Intelligence, military historian James L. Gilbert provides an authoritative overview of the birth of modern Army intelligence. Following the natural division of the intelligence war, which was fought on both the home front and overseas, Gilbert traces the development and use of intelligence and counterintelligence through the eyes of their principal architects: General Dennis E. Nolan and Colonel Ralph Van Deman. Gilbert explores how on the home front, US Army counterintelligence faced both internal and external threats that began with the Army's growing concerns over the loyalty of resident aliens who were being drafted into the ranks and soon evolved into the rooting out of enemy saboteurs and spies intent on doing great harm to America's war effort. To achieve their goals, counterintelligence personnel relied upon major strides in the areas of code breaking and detection of secret inks. Overseas, the intelligence effort proved far more extensive in terms of resources and missions, even reaching into nearby neutral countries. Intelligence within the American Expeditionary Forces was heavily indebted to its Allied counterparts who not only provided an organizational blueprint but also veteran instructors and equipment needed to train newly arriving intelligence specialists. Rapid advances by American intelligence were also made possible by the appointment of competent leaders and the recruitment of highly motivated and skilled personnel; likewise, the Army's decision to assign the bulk of its linguists to support intelligence proved critical. World War I would witness the linkage between intelligence and emerging technologies-from the use of cameras in aircraft to the intercept of enemy radio transmissions. Equally significant was the introduction of new intelligence disciplines-from exploitation of captured equipment to the translation of enemy documents. These and other functions that emerged from World War I would continue to the present to provide military intelligence with the essential tools necessary to support the Army and the nation. World War I and the Origins of U.S. Military Intelligence is ideal not only for students and scholars of military history and World War I, but will also appeal to any reader interested in how modern intelligence operations first evolved.

More than 16,000 Canadian soldiers suffered from shell shock during the Great War of 1914 to 1918. Despite significant interest from historians, we still know relatively little about how it was experienced, diagnosed, treated, and managed in the frontline trenches in the Canadian and British forces. How did soldiers relate to suffering comrades? Did large numbers of shell shock cases affect the outcome of important battles? Was frontline psychiatric treatment as effective as many experts claimed after the war? Were Canadians treated any differently than other Commonwealth soldiers? A Weary Road is the first comprehensive study to address these important questions. Author Mark Osborne Humphries uses research from Canadian, British, and Australian archives, including hundreds of newly available hospital records and patient medical files, to provide a history of war trauma as it was experienced, treated, and managed by ordinary soldiers.

A fascinating look at the British naval intervention in the Baltic in 1918-20, and at the British, Soviet and Baltic nationalist fleets that fought. Following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Baltic states became a battleground between Russian Reds and Whites, German troops and emerging Baltic independence forces. In November 1918, the British government decided to intervene, to protect British interests and to support the emerging Baltic states. This initial small force of cruisers and destroyers was eventually augmented by other British warships, including aircraft carriers, a monitor, as well as a handful of submarines and torpedo boats. Opposing them was the far more powerful Russian Baltic Fleet, now controlled by the Bolsheviks. The campaign that followed involved naval clashes between the two sides, the most spectacular of which was an attack on the Soviet naval base of Kronstadt in June 1919 by a force of small British torpedo boats. They torpedoed and sunk the Russian cruiser Oleg, an action which effectively bottled the Baltic fleet up in port for the remainder of the campaign. Finally, in early 1920, the British squadron was withdrawn, following Soviet recognition of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This New Vanguard title explores the naval side of this little-known but strategically crucial campaign fought by the war-weary navies of Britain and Russia and by warships of the emerging Baltic states. Describing the political background to the conflict, and the key points of the naval campaign as well as the warships involved, this is a concise and fascinating account of an overlooked naval campaign that helped reshape the map of Europe.

Clash of Fleets is an operational history that records every naval engagement fought between major surface warships during World War I. Much more than a catalog of combat facts, Clash of Fleets explores why battles occurred; how the different navies fought; and how combat advanced doctrine and affected the development and application of technology. The result is a holistic overview of the war at sea as it affected all nations and all theaters of war. A work of this scope is unprecedented. Organized into seven chapters, the authors first introduce the technology, weapons, ships, and the doctrine that governed naval warfare in 1914. The next five chapters explore each year of the war and are subdivided into sections corresponding to major geographic areas. This arrangement allows the massive sweep of action to be presented in a structured and easy to follow format that includes engagements fought by the Austro-Hungarian, British, French, German, Ottoman, and Russian Navies in the Adriatic, Aegean, Baltic, Black, Mediterranean, and North Seas as well as the Atlantic, India, and Pacific Oceans. The role of surface combat in the Great War is analyzed and these actions are compared to major naval wars before and after. In addition to providing detailed descriptions of actions in their historical perspectives, O'Hara and Heinz advance several themes, including the notion that World War I was a war of navies as much as a war of armies. They explain that surface combat had a major impact on all aspects of the naval war and on the course of the war in general. Finally, Clash of Fleets illustrates that systems developed in peace do not always work as expected in war, that some are not used as anticipated, and that others became unexpectedly important. There is much for today's naval professional to consider in the naval conflict that occurred a century ago.

When war engulfed Europe in 1914, the conflict quickly took on global dimensions. Although fighting erupted in Africa and Asia, the Great War primarily pulled troops from around the world into Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Amid the fighting were large numbers of expeditionary forces-and yet they have remained largely unstudied as a collective phenomenon, along with the term "expeditionary force" itself. This collection examines the expeditionary experience through a wide range of case studies. They cover major themes such as the recruitment, transport, and supply of far-flung troops; the cultural and linguistic dissonance, as well as gender relations, navigated by soldiers in foreign lands; the political challenge of providing a rationale to justify their dislocation and sacrifice; and the role of memory and memorialization. Together, these essays open up new avenues for understanding the experiences of soldiers who fought the First World War far from home.

In the horrific conflict of 1914-1918 known first as "The Great War" and later as World War I, Latin American nations were peripheral players. Only after the U.S. entered the fighting in 1917 did eight of the twenty republics declare war. Five others broke diplomatic relations with Germany, while seven maintained strict neutrality. These diplomatic stances, even those of the two actual belligerents-Brazil and Cuba-did little to tip the balance of victory in favor of the allies, and perhaps that explains why historians have paid scant attention to events in Latin America related to the war. Nevertheless, it is still remarkable that Percy Alvin Martin's classic account, Latin American and the War, first published in 1925, remains the standard text on the topic. This book attempts to redress this gap by taking a fresh look at developments between 1914 and 1921 in one of the neutral nations-Colombia. This period, which coincides with the presidency of Jose Vicente Concha (1914-1918) and his successor, Marco Fidel Suarez (1918-1921), is filled with momentous developments not only in foreign policy, when Colombian diplomats pressured by German, British and U.S. propaganda struggled to maintain strict neutrality, but also on the domestic scene as the newly installed Conservative regime faced political and economic crises that sparked numerous and violent protests. Rausch's examination of the administrations of Concha and Suarez supports Martin's assertion that even those countries neutral in the Great War were not immune from its effects.

This two volume series serves as a unique window to view the U.S. Army's entry onto the world stage. Faced with entry into the "Great War," the country called upon its military leaders to prepare the Army for combat. What follows is the in-depth story of how the American military and civilian leadership created and trained the Doughboys. In less than eighteen months, America's Army would grow from its humble beginning to fielding over a million soldiers in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. Training and leading this force into battle against the Imperial German Army were some of the great names in American military history, including such stalwarts as John J. Pershing, George Marshall, and Leonard Wood. Here is the story of their perseverance and courage that ultimately defeated the enemy and helped to win the war.

Although civilian internment has become associated with the Second World War in popular memory, it has a longer history. The turning point in this history occurred during the First World War when, in the interests of 'security' in a situation of total war, the internment of 'enemy aliens' became part of state policy for the belligerent states, resulting in the incarceration, displacement and, in more extreme cases, the death by neglect or deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world. This pioneering book on internment during the First World War brings together international experts to investigate the importance of the conflict for the history of civilian incarceration.

This book analyzes the development of the Lost Generation narrative following the First World War. The author examines narratives that illustrate the fracture of upper-class identity, including well-known examples of the Lost Generation-Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Vera Brittain-as well as other less typical cases-George Mallory and JRR Tolkien-to demonstrate the effects of the First World War on British society, culture, and politics.

This book explores how print journalism was a powerful and persistent influence on public attitudes to, and memories of, the First World War in a range of participant nations, including Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, the United States and Australia. With contributions from an international group of history, journalism and literary studies scholars, the book identifies and analyses five distinct roles played by the print media: producing and narrating histories of the war or its constituent episodes; serialising and reviewing memoirs or fictional accounts written by participants; reporting and framing the rituals and ceremonies of local and national commemoration; providing a platform for various war-related advocacy groups or campaigns, from veterans' associations to early Civil Rights movements; and using the war as a lens through which to interpret future conflicts. This innovative collection demonstrates the significance of journalism in shaping the public understanding of the First World War after 1918, and shows how the representations and narratives of the conflict reflected the political and social changes of the post-war decades. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

The First World War was the first 'total war'. Its industrial weaponry damaged millions of men and drove whole armies underground into dangerously unhealthy trenches. Many were killed. Many more suffered terrible, life-threatening injuries: wound infections such as gas gangrene and tetanus, exposure to extremes of temperature, emotional trauma and systemic disease. In an effort to alleviate this suffering, tens of thousands of women volunteered to serve as nurses. Of these, some were experienced professionals, while others had undergone only minimal training. But regardless of their preparation, they would all gain a unique understanding of the conditions of industrial warfare. Until recently their contributions, both to the saving of lives and to our understanding of warfare, have remained largely hidden from view. By combining biographical research with textual analysis, Nurse writers of the great war opens a window onto their insights into the nature of nursing and the impact of warfare. -- .

The final years of Theodore Roosevelt's life have long been considered a dark, aberrant period in which a once-great statesman descended into contrarianism and ill health as his legacy was eclipsed by world events. This stirring narrative decisively puts the lie to such depictions of Roosevelt's twilight years, showing the characteristic dignity, intellectual brilliance, and youthful vigor with which he confronted both private hardships and the onset of the First World War.
It was a historical moment eerily reminiscent of our own: violence in the failed state of Mexico bleeding across the border, an insurgency brewing within the Republican party, and an eloquent and charismatic Democratic president facing a global conflict while bedeviled by constant and vitriolic partisan attacks. That president was Woodrow Wilson, and his committed adversary was Theodore Roosevelt, who would wage a personal and political battle against the administration until the day he died. This duel of American titans lies at the center of J. Lee Thompson's history, which is the first modern account of Roosevelt exclusively during the war years. This is a tale of politics and global conflict, but also a private story of true love and familial devotion: the love of Theodore and Edith Roosevelt and the deep bonds of affection they held for all their children--particularly sons Ted, Kermit, Archie, and Quentin, who all served bravely on the front. From public triumphs to personal tragedies, Thompson gives us a long-overdue look at the later life of one of American history's most indelible figures, as well as the inexorable process by which the US was drawn into the greatest war the world had yet seen.

Over the last 30 years, hydrographical marine surveys in the English Channel helped uncover the potential wreck sites of German submarines, or U-boats, sunk during the conflicts of World War I and World War II. Through a series of systemic dives, nautical archaeologist and historian Innes McCartney surveyed and recorded these wrecks, discovering that the distribution and number of wrecks conflicted with the published histories of U-boat losses. Of all the U-boat war losses in the Channel, McCartney found that some 41% were heretofore unaccounted for in the historical literature of World War I and World War II. This book reconciles these inaccuracies with the archaeological record by presenting case studies of a number of dives conducted in the English Channel. Using empirical evidence, this book investigates possible reasons historical inconsistencies persist and what Allied operational and intelligence-based processes caused them to occur in the first place. This book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of nautical archaeology and naval history, as well as wreck explorers.

The shipwrecks of WWI constitute a vast, dispersed and distinctive underwater legacy. This insightful book addresses the need to rethink how they can be protected, through an examination of both private and public international law and the conventions governing them. The recent centenary of WWI has prompted a shift in the way attention is focused on legacy wrecks. In this timely book, Craig Forrest considers both the development and current state of the laws that apply to these wrecks, as well as the issues that surround them, such as regulated and unregulated salvage and the potentially hazardous nature of wrecks left in situ. The author then deftly analyses the adequacy of the existing legal framework, in particular the Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage, to fulfill its promise of protecting legacy wrecks for future generations as historical and archaeological resources, memorials and, more importantly, as maritime war graves. This incisive book will prove necessary reading for all with an interest in underwater cultural heritage and its protection, including academics, practitioners and managers, government officials and policymakers. Underwater archaeologists and others interested in maritime law and naval history more broadly will also find its unique analysis useful.

This volume will explore the specific role which war has played in the constitution of a modern mentality. It will be divided into three parts: one dealing with issues of conceptualizing war, violence, and modernity/ modernism, one devoted to issues of the First World War as an exemplary experience in the 20th century; and one concerned with issues of violence and its representation in the aftermath of the first modern war.

In 1918, the Germans launched the Spring Offensive. Aware that American troops would soon be arriving in Europe, the Germans saw this as their last chance to win the war. If they could overcome the Allied armies and reach Paris, victory might be possible. The German offensive was initially a great success. Striking at the Allied line's strongest point, the Chemin des Dames, they burst their way through and made quick progress towards Marne. However, the advance eventually stalled. With supply shortages and lack of reserves, this was to be the "last ebb" of the German war effort. Sidney Rogerson, a young officer in the West Yorkshire Regiment, describes the experiences of his battalion from the Aisne through to the Marne. Fighting under French command, the West Yorkshires were inadequately supported by artillery and practically without help from the air. The four tired divisions were forced to fight and run twenty-seven miles across wooded downlands and three rivers surviving on only emergency rations. In The Last of the Ebb, the author vividly conveys the great bravery and extraordinary resilience of the West Yorkshires, who were able to face up to the terrible ordeal of such a battle without loss of morale. Remarkably for a book of this period, an account by Major-General A. D. von Unruh, which gives the German perspective of the offensive, has been included.