World War I

Paul Dickson | July/August 2020

In the largest protest of the Depression, World War I veterans converged on Washington, DC seeking justice. They were met with tanks, bayonets, and tear gas.

Editor’s Note: We asked historian Paul Dickson to give us some perspective on the recent demonstrations in the Nation’s Capital.

Best Memoirs of the Great War

Edward G. Lengel | Summer 2019

A leading historian of World War I picks the best accounts of the war among the hundreds he's consulted in his research.

We asked Edward Lengel, a Contributing Editor of American Heritage, to chose his favorite memoirs of World War I and tell us a little about them. Mr.

Remembering the "Wild West" Division in WWI

Edward G. Lengel | Winter 2019

What Germans Said About the Americans

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

After World War I, Army Intelligence officers collected statements from German soldiers and citizens.

After the War, American intelligence officers combed through interrogation records and intercepted letters to compiled a report about what Germans thought of their former enemies.

Agony of the Lost Battalion

Edward G. Lengel | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

In October 1918, 600 men of the 77th Division attacked a heavily defended German position, charging forward until they were completely surrounded by enemy forces. Only 194 men walked out when they were finally rescued.

For much of the last ten years, military historian Edward G. Lengel has researched the First World War.

The Heartbreaking Loss of Lt. Quentin Roosevelt

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

The Hello Girls

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

America’s first female soldiers were Signal Corps telephone operators making sure critical messages got through, often while threatened by artillery fire.

The Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers, by Elizabeth Cobbs

Belgians Deported to Slave Labor Camps

Jeffrey B. Miller | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

American volunteers distributing food to starving Belgians witnessed the dramatic deportations, when an estimated 120,000 men were taken to factories in Germany.

The War to End All Wars

Edwin S. Grosvenor | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

One hundred years ago, the bloody fighting finally stopped in the forests of eastern France. We commemorate that event with this special issue of American Heritage.

The Meaning of 1918

John Lukacs | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

A century after the guns fell silent along the Western Front, the work they did there remains of incalculable importance to the age we inhabit and the people we are

Jazz Delights the World

Ryan Reft | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

During the World War I, American jazz bands played at hospitals, rest camps and other venues, delighting doughboys and Europeans alike.

Herbert Hoover Recalls the Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson

Herbert Hoover | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

We re-publish an essay President Hoover wrote for American Heritage in 1958 recounting his experiences as an aide to Woodrow Wilson at the peace talks after World War I. This important first-person narrative candidly details the difficulties that Wilson faced in what Hoover called “the greatest drama of intellectual leadership in all history.”

Reprinted from the June 1958 issue of American Heritage.

My Time in the Horse-Drawn Artillery

Dean Acheson | Spring 2018

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson recalled his time as a "driver" in the horse-drawn artillery, after Pres. Wilson discovered the U.S. had practically no Army.

From "Practice Range," American Heritage, February, 1968

In Search of “Black Jack” Pershing

Gene Smith | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

A noted historian recalls how he came to learn about the five-star general who led American forces to victory in World War I, and the sacrifices made by his family.

Editor's Note: This essay, the last that Gene Smith wrote for American Heritage, was in our files when the historian passed away in 2012. Gene was a long-time favorite of our editors, having published 31 essays in the magazi

An American Hero: Sargent York

Bruce Watson | Fall 2018 - World War I Special Issue

In history’s long parade of military heroes, few can rival Sergeant Alvin C. York

America's Bloodiest Battle

Edward G. Lengel | Summer 2010

American doughboys proved their mettle in the forests and fields of eastern France during World War I

On October 11, 1918, late in the afternoon, a platoon of American doughboys marched to the front in eastern France, passing shattered villages, forests reduced to matchsticks, and water-filled shell craters. At every step the Americans struggled to free their boots from the slopping mud.

A Funny Man Writes A Serious Historical Novel

Allen Barra | April/May 2007

Gene Wilder discusses his new World War I adventure

Gene Wilder, the son of russian Jewish immigrants, was born in Milwaukee in 1933.

History Now

April/May 2007

Hitchcock On Location

George Perry | April/May 2007

You can go there too, even to the Bates Motel

Why Do We Say...?

Hugh Rawson | April/May 2007

Pork Barrel

A “Call it Pork or Necessity, but Alaska Comes Out Far Above the Rest in Spending.” This headline—from The New York Times—was for a story about the $388 billion federal Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2005.

“Don’t Be A Show Off”

Gene Smith | April/May 2007

The book that taught GI’s how to behave in England

Pop Goes The Nation

Janet Souter | April/May 2007

“The founding of the United States experience: 1763-1815”

The Founding of the United States Experience (Presidio Press, 64 pages, $50) earns the slightly unwieldy last word in its title, because digging into this handsome volume creates an experience much like rooting through a treasure-filled attic.

Resources

April/May 2007

The Buyable Past

David Lander | April/May 2007

The License Plate

Modern America 1917 To 1941

William E. Leuchtenburg | November/December 2004

Few periods in the history of this country can match the impact of the years between 1917 and 1941. In less than a generation America experienced the first large-scale dispatch of U.S.

Airpower’s Century

Fredric Smoler | November/December 2003

Powered flight was born exactly one hundred years ago. It changed everything, of course—but most of all, it changed how we wage war.

Walter Boyne’s résumé makes for unusual reading. He is the author of 42 books and one of the few people to have had bestsellers on both the fiction and the nonfiction lists of The New York Times.

My Grandfather’s War

Ephraim Rubenstein | November 2000

How the discovery of a long-forgotten trunk inspired an artist to spend years recording the quiet remnants of a wrenching military career.

My grandfather spoke to me about his experiences in the first World War only once, and that was abruptly and in anger. As young boys, my brothers and I would spend part of our summer vacations with my grandparents.

Colonel McCormick’s War

Thomas Fleming | April 2000

The newspaper baron Robert McCormick was a passionate isolationist—yet his brief service in France in 1918 shone for him all his life and gave birth to an extraordinary museum

History’s Largest Lessons

Fredric Smoler | February/March 1997

A historian of the ancient world believes that in every era humankind has reacted to the demands of waging war in surprisingly similar ways, and that to protect our national interests today Americans must understand the choices soldiers and statesmen made hundreds and even thousands of years ago

In a time when the usefulness of the past as a means to comprehend the present remains the object of skepticism, if not outright attack, inside the academy, Donald Kagan, the former dean of Yale College and a professor of ancient history, has published a book about the necessit

Revising The Twentieth Century

John Lukacs | September 1994

THE GREAT STRUGGLES of our century have all been followed by tides of revulsion: Americans decided we were mad to have entered World War I; Russia should have been our enemy in World War II; the United States started the Cold War. Now another such tide has risen in Europe, and it may be on its way here.

HISTORY IS REVISIONISM. IT IS THE FREQUENT —nay, the ceaseless—reviewing and revising and rethinking of the past.

Subscribe to World War I

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.

Catton, Bruce

Bruce Catton (1899 – 1978) was the Founding Editor of American Heritage and arguably the most prolific and popular of all Civil War historians. He wrote an astonishing 167 articles for American Heritage, and won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia. Catton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, from President Gerald Ford, in 1977, the year before his death.

Commager, Henry Steele

A longtime member of the editorial advisory board of AMERICAN HERITAGE, Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) taught at New York University, Columbia, and Amherst College, and authored more than forty books. He first gained attention in 1930 as co-author, with Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison, of The Growth of the American Republic, which became a standard textbook for decades. His anthology Documents of American History (1938) remained a widely used collection of primary sources for many years.

Dickson, Paul

Paul Dickson is the author of more than 55 nonfiction books and hundreds of magazine articles. Although he has written on a variety of subjects from ice cream to kite flying to electronic warfare, he now concentrates on writing about the American language, baseball and 20th century history. Bestselling books include: Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, The Hidden Language of Baseball, and The Joy of Keeping Score.

Dolin, Eric Jay

Eric Jay Dolin is a bestselling author of popular books on American history, maritime history, and the environment. His works include Fur, Fortune, And Empire, a history of America's fur trade, Black Flags, Blue Waters, about the history of pirating in America, and Leviathan, about the history of whaling in the U.S. His more recent book is A Furious Sky, which retraces 500 years of hurricanes in America and the impact they had on the nation's development.

Eisenhower, John D.

John D. Eisenhower, the son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is a retired United States Army officer and the author of several books on military history. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium from 1969 to 1971.

Ellis, Joseph J.

Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf 2000), is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College whose work focuses on the lives and times of the founders of the United States of America.

Fleming, Thomas

Thomas Fleming is a longtime contributor to American Heritage and former president of the Society of American Historians.

Flexner, James Thomas

James Thomas Flexner (1908-2003) was most famous for his extensive writings on American art history and a four-volume biography of George Washington, for which he won a special Pulitzer citation. Flexner's other historical biographies include the one-volume Washington: The Indispensable Man, The Young Hamilton, Mohawk Baronet (Sir William Johnson, 1st Baronet), and The Traitor and the Spy: Benedict Arnold and John Andre.

Foner, Eric

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. One of the foremost experts on the Civil War, Slavery, Reconstruction, and Abraham Lincoln, Foner's most recent book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, published in the fall of 2010, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 2011.

Gates, Henry Louis

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, and the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. He recently completed The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader (Basic Civitas Books, 2012), a collection of essays on history, culture, and African-American genealogy. Gates has hosted several PBS television miniseries, including the history and travel program Wonders of the African World and the biographical African American Lives and Faces of America.

Gordon, John Steele

John Steele Gordon has been a frequent contributor to American Heritage and the Wall Street Journal. He is the author most recently of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power (HarperCollins 2004). Gordon's writing concentrates on business and financial history, and his 1999 book, The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000, was adapted into a two-hour CNBC special.

Gordon-Reed, Annette

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Professor of History and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.

Holzer, Harold

Harold Holzer, a frequent contributor and winner of a 2005 Lincoln Prize for Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President (Simon & Schuster 2006), has written more than 40 books about the 16th president. He currently chairs The Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush in 2008. Holzer, educated at the City University of New York, first worked as a newspaper editor for The Manhattan Tribune, served as a political campaign press secretary for Congresswoman Bella S.

Lukacs, John

John Lukacs served as a Professor of History at Chestnut Hill College from 1947 to 1994, and is the noted author of over 30 books including:Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, The Legacy of the Second World War and The Future of History in 2011.

Maier, Pauline

Pauline Maier was the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American History at MIT. She primarily wrote on the American Revolution and Early Republic. Her book, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence, was named as a top book of 1997 by the New York Times Book Review and was a finalist in General Nonfiction for the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Her book Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 won the prestigious George Washington Book Prize in 2010.

McCullough, David

David McCullough is an author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and Francis Parkman Prizes.

McPherson, James M.

James M. McPherson, the George Henry Davis ’86 Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is perhaps America’s foremost living Civil War scholar. Among his books are his one-volume history of the war, Battle Cry of Freedom, Lincoln and The Second American Revolution, and For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War, winner of the Lincoln Prize in 1998.

Reynolds, David S.

David S. Reynolds is a literary critic and historian who has written fifteen books about American history, literature and culture. These include Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times, John Brown, Abolitionist, Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson and Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America.

Schlesinger, Arthur

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917-2007) was a historian, author, and political adviser who served as Special Assistant to President John Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. Schlesinger won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Age of Jackson. In 1966, Schlesinger won another Pulitzer Prize for A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. He was honored with a National Humanities Medal and a Four Freedoms Award before his death in 2007.

Tuchman, Barbara W.

Barbara Tuchman (1912 – 1989) was an American historian and author who first became known for her best-selling book The Guns of August, a history of the prelude to and first month of World War I, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1963. She won a second Pulitzer for Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1972).

Watkins, T. H.

One of the foremost chroniclers of the American West, T. H. Watkins was an editor at American Heritage for six years and a long-time contributor. He also served as Editor of Wilderness magazine for fifteen years, and as Wallace Stegner Distinguished Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University.

World War I

ARTICLES ON POPULAR SUBJECTS

We hope you enjoy our work.

Featured Authors