North Carolina S Experience During The First World War

As America's involvement in World War I approached its centennial, state-level histories and commemoration of the Great War abounded. While North Carolina's role in the First World War has yet to attract such intense scholarly interest, a much-needed picture of the wartime Tar Heel state has nevertheless begun to emerge from newly published firsthand accounts of the war and sustained attention to the state's wartime politicians. The essays in North Carolina's Experience during the First World War, skillfully edited by Shepherd W. McKinley and Steven Sabol, provide in-depth interpretation of the state's involvement in WWI. As topics range from soldiers and the military, to women and the home front, to politics and labor issues, a detailed picture emerges of the war's influence on the developing modern state and the ascendant bureaucratic social order. As this anthology makes clear, wars provide the opportunity for unsettling old patterns of power and culture. Unlike the Civil War and Second World War, however, the First World War would have relatively little effect on North Carolina's race relations, class arrangements, gender roles, economic order, and political leadership. What changed more dramatically was the relationship between business and government. Indeed, government took an unprecedented place in the fabric of society and the economy as the "war to end all wars" left its indelible mark on the individuals and families who served. SHEPHERD W. MCKINLEY is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of Stinking Stones and Rocks of Gold: Phosphate, Fertilizer, and Industrialization in Postbellum South Carolina and North Carolina: New Directions for an Old Land. STEVEN SABOL is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of Russian Colonization and the Genesis of Kazak National Consciousness.

"This book includes fourteen essays on Tennessee's experience during World War I. The essays introduce a range of entry points to the conflict from typical soldier stories - including Birdwell's own essay on Alvin York - to politics, agribusiness, African Americans, and present-day recollections"--

This collection of nineteen original essays on selected topics and epochs in North Carolina history offers a broad survey of the state from its discovery and colonization to the present. Each chapter consists of an interpretive essay on a specific aspect of North Carolina's history, a collection of supporting documents, and a brief bibliography. Selections cover historical periods ranging from Elizabethan to contemporary times and examine such issues as slavery, populism, civil rights, and the status of women. Essays address the tragedy of North Carolina's Indians, the state's role in the Revolutionary War and the Confederacy, and the impact of the Great Depression. North Carolina's place in the New South and evangelical culture in the state are also discussed. Designed as a supplementary reader for the study and teaching of North Carolina history, The North Carolina Experience will introduce college students to the process of historical research and writing. It will also be a valuable resource in secondary schools, public libraries, and the homes of those interested in North Carolina history.

Examining the First World War through the lens of the American South How did World War I affect the American South? Did southerners experience the war in a particular way? How did regional considerations and, more generally, southern values and culture impact the wider war effort? Was there a distinctive southern experience of WWI? Scholars considered these questions during “Dixie’s Great War,” a symposium held at the University of Alabama in October 2017 to commemorate the centenary of the American intervention in the war. With the explicit intent of exploring iterations of the Great War as experienced in the American South and by its people, organizers John M. Giggie and Andrew J. Huebner also sought to use historical discourse as a form of civic engagement designed to facilitate a community conversation about the meanings of the war. Giggie and Huebner structured the panels thematically around military, social, and political approaches to the war to encourage discussion and exchanges between panelists and the public alike. Drawn from transcriptions of the day’s discussions and lightly edited to preserve the conversational tone and mix of professional and public voices, Dixie’s Great War: World War I and the American South captures the process of historians at work with the public, pushing and probing general understandings of the past, uncovering and reflecting on the deeper truths and lessons of the Great War—this time, through the lens of the South. This volume also includes an introduction featuring a survey of recent literature dealing with regional aspects of WWI and a discussion of the centenary commemorations of the war. An afterword by noted historian Jay Winter places “Dixie’s Great War”—the symposium and this book—within the larger framework of commemoration, emphasizing the vital role such forums perform in creating space and opportunity for scholars and the public alike to assess and understand the shifting ground between cultural memory and the historical record.

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.

Between 1917 and 1919 women enlisted in the Women's Land Army, a national organisation with the task of increasing domestic food production. Behind the scenes organisers laboured to not only recruit an army of women workers, but to also dispel public fears that Britain's Land Girls would be defeminized and devalued by their wartime experiences.

This book examines the particular experience of ethnic, religious and national minorities who participated in the First World War as members of the main belligerent powers: Britain, France, Germany and Russia. Individual chapters explore themes including contested loyalties, internment, refugees, racial violence, genocide and disputed memories from 1914 through into the interwar years to explore how minorities made the transition from war to peace at the end of the First World War. The first section discusses so-called ‘friendly minorities’, considering the way in which Jews, Muslims and refugees lived through the war and its aftermath. Section two looks at fears of ‘enemy aliens’, which prompted not only widespread internment, but also violence and genocide. The third section considers how the wartime experience of minorities played out in interwar Europe, exploring debates over political representation and remembrance. Bridging the gap between war and peace, this is the ideal book for all those interested in both First World War and minority histories.

Although the Civil War and the Great War were fought only fifty years apart, the perceived time between these two cataclysmic events seems far longer in popular American memory: the Civil War was the centerpiece of the nineteenth century and lies deep in America’s past whereas World War I was a modern prelude to World War II, a conflict still in living memory. Wars Civil and Great breaks down these barriers of time and memory and shows how close and how similar these two conflicts really were in the American experience. Setting both wars in the long nineteenth century, the authors of this volume reveal how the Civil War cast its long shadow over the events of the Great War. President Wilson looked to Lincoln during the Great War for guidance on national leadership at wartime; General John J. Pershing remembered the Civil War of his childhood and sought to learn lessons from Grant and McClellan; and the doughboys on European battlefields held firm to the culture of honor and duty that had inspired their forefathers to take up arms. In this volume, every author as an expert in their own field addresses four overarching questions: What legacy did the Civil War leave? Did the Great War generation interpret the lessons of the Civil War, and if so, how? How did the Great War change the lessons from the Civil War era? And finally, how did both wars contribute to the modernization of the United States? Wars Civil and Great highlights the striking similarities between the two wars by analyzing how the Civil War affected the American reaction to and experience in the Great War while attending to enlisted men, military officers, and political leaders. Other chapters address the environmental effects of both wars, the wars’ impacts on medicine and mental trauma, and the experiences of Black American soldiers in both wars as they fought for a country that treated them so terribly. This volume, while at first appearing as a disparate pairing of conflicts, deftly opens a new window into the past and establishes an illuminating paradigm in the two wars of the long nineteenth century.